The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is a time-loop movie that might just
change how you see the point of your existence.
This is The Takeaway, a series brought to you by The Take,
where we break down the endings of your favorite films and TV shows
to get to their deeper meanings and messages.
In this episode, we’re unpacking what happened at the end of
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, and how the movie reveals that
time isn’t something we lose with every passing second.
It’s something we can gain by creating the collection of
perfect moments that make up a life.
“Every second of perfect moments, one after the other until by the end,
you have your whole life.”
[Music]
The film ends with Margaret and Mark escaping their time-loop -- at last,
They’re temporally and emotionally unstuck, ready for the future.
Their first act on this brand new morning is to return the lost dog
that Margaret’s been looking for since the first scene when she
enters the film.
“We just have all this-- this time. I guess I just wanted to try and,
like, fix something.”
To Margaret, this missing dog was a symbol of how the world was
broken and unfixable.
Even if she managed to find and return the dog,
it wouldn’t change anything.
“Tomorrow… He’ll just be lost all over again.”
With this ending, Margaret signals that she’s ready to try to fix
what’s broken in this world, and to let herself heal.
[Whispers] “I know it’s gonna hurt really bad, but I think that I have to
wake up now.”
There are two major shifts in the story that get us to this ending.
First, after trying seemingly everything under the sun to break his time-loop,
Mark has a revelation: he’s not the hero of this story.
“It wasn’t my story at all… It was Margaret’s.”
We discover that Margaret wanted time to stop --
because she wasn’t ready to move on to the first day
when she would wake up as a motherless child.
“I’m not ready to not have a mom. I just wanted time to stop.”
And the second major shift in the story is that Margaret finally becomes ready
to face her grief.
After an honest conversation with her mom helps Margaret see
how many positive experiences await her, she can complete the map of tiny
perfect things with the one moment that was missing -- her kiss with Mark --
“I think that this is the moment, right now, and I don’t want to miss it.”
-- and move on into the messy, imperfect future.
So let’s look more closely at what it takes for Margaret
and Mark to break their cycle, and what they teach all of us
about how to get unstuck.
[Music]
When we meet Mark, he’s already well-adjusted to his time-loop.
“Daiquiri, it’s a village in Cuba. It’s got three I’s in it.
And… toast time.”
He’s a master at optimizing the little details and rhythms of his morning,
but so far hasn’t had much luck with the real business of his day:
trying to impress the cute girl who gets hit by a beach ball at the pool.
“Sorry… are you okay?”
“Thank you!”
Like many of us, Mark has seen time-loop movies before.
“It’s just wake up, rejection, repeat.”
“Is that from Edge of Tomorrow?”
“Yeah, it is.”
Pop-culture classics like Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow,
and Doctor Who are pretty much his only tool for processing
what might be happening and what the point of it could be.
“Is time just a big ball of wibbly wobbly
timey wimey stuff?”
“Okay, that-- that’s a quote from Doctor Who.”
It’s only when Mark meets Margaret -- another person experiencing
this temporal anomaly -- that he starts to develop a more
original perspective of his situation.
After he starts sharing his tiny perfect things with her, and
Margaret shows him one she’s found -- the eagle catching he fish in the lake --
this gives him he idea to find all the perfect moments in this one day.
“We must miss so many of them! All those tiny perfect things are just,
poof, gone, lost forever… but not today.”
When Margaret eventually finds the map of tiny perfect things
that Mark re-draws every day, we see that he’s trying to glean
some meaning from the combination of all these random, beautiful occurrences.
“Sometimes I think if I stare at it long enough, I’ll find something,
like a-- like a pattern.”
Yet at this point, he’s still to a large degree following
the Groundhog Day playbook.
“Wait, wasn’t that a movie where Bill Murray is stuck in the same day
‘till her has sex with his hot boss?”
Mark assumes the ultimate point of this is experience is to fall in love.
“Things get more and more romantic, and then bam! You kiss her.”
“I don’t think that’s the sound effect that I would go for.”
“Okay, but you gotta get the kiss, though.”
In Groundhog Day, before Phill Connors can get the girl, he has to realize
that the key to his happiness is to stop being self-centered --
“The wretch, concentered all in self, shall go down to the vile dust,
from whence he sprung.”
-- and live more for others.
“Is there anything I can do for you… today?”
And while Mark doesn’t start out as a jerk like Phil,
he still must learn to step outside his habitual, self-centered view.
“I think about other people beside myself.
You should try it sometime.”
After Margaret doesn’t want to Start a romance and they
spend some time apart --
“This cuz I won’t kiss you?... Why don’t you kiss one of them?”
-- Mark finds fulfillment by thinking more about what’s going on in
other people’s inner worlds.
“Hey Dad… how’s your book going?”
“It’s gr-- it’s great!”
Through this, he starts affecting the day in deeper ways
than he ever did before.
And he begins a new chain of events that leads him to see the full picture.
At last, he discovers where Margaret goes each evening --
to the hospital to visit her mother on her deathbed, over and over.
And this makes Mark realize, at last: The world doesn’t revolve around him.
“I thought it was a love story, and I was the hero,
but… it wasn’t about me.”
“The world doesn’t revolve around me” is a key revelation that every
adolescent must experience.
“Adolescent egocentrism” is the name for the very common belief of many older
tweens and teens that (as Verywell Family puts it)
“all eyes are on them all the time.”
Moreover, the twist that this is Margaret’s narrative is a welcome reveal
for a movie subgenre that does almost always revolve around a male.
In Groundhog Day, we never see Andie MacDowell’s Rita
struggling with much; she just seems to have been
a pretty awesome person from the start.
“These people are great! Some of them been
partying all night long! They sing songs
‘till they get too cold and then they go sit by the fire
and they get warm and then they come back
and then sing some more!”
And the end of the movie turns her more or less into Phil’s prize
for becoming such a great guy.
“I’m happy now., because I love you.”
“I think I’m happy too.”
Meanwhile, the way that Margaret is introduced might make her seem
like she’s going to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl
who’s there to help give Mark’s life purpose with her
quirky and fascinating personality.
“Except time’s not in the fourth dimension.”
“It’s not?”
“No, not in any meaningful Euclidean sense.”
She even makes math cute!
“The first thing you need to know about math is that it’s always perfect.”
But the film subverts these expectations by revealing that the point isn’t for
Mark to figure out his purpose at all.
He’s there to support, motivate, and inspire Margaret as she comes to terms
with her mother’s death.
“I think it’s because, you know, when it’s time to go,
I wouldn’t have to go alone.”
In a foreshadowing of the movie’s romantic climax,
after she sees the map, it’s Margaret who can
instinctively grasp what the pattern is.
[Whispers] “You made a map of us.”
Meanwhile, a cool easter egg at the start of the movie goes some way
to explaining why Mark’s map doesn’t work until she gets involved.
In the library, Mark is reading Douglas Adams’ sci-fi novel
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Famously, in this book, the super-computer Deep Thought
calculates that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42.
But nobody understands this answer, because they don’t know the question.
“But it was the great question! The ultimate question of life,
the universe, and everything!
“But what actually is it?”
For Mark, the answer to life, the universe, and everything may be
the map of tiny perfect things -- but he doesn’t understand why.
It’s only when Margaret participates with her much greater understanding
of why they’re there and her ability to make this 2-D map into something
four-dimensional that they grasp both the answer and the question,
and can leave the time-loop together.
[Music]
This time-loop was caused by Margaret’s refusal to accept her mother’s death.
And if we look closer, Margaret’s attitude
reflects well-documented symptoms of grief.
The time-loop is effectively a metaphor for Margaret’s denial:
she literally won’t allow reality to continue by denying that
time has to move on.
“Sometimes I don’t want this day to end… I just want time to stay
broken forever.”
Meanwhile, she uses reckless driving as an outlet for her anger.
[Car horn] “Hey, watch it!”
Even when she shows Mark the first perfect thing,
it’s Mark who sees positive meaning it in.
For Margaret, it’s a very different image.
“I think I identify with that fish.”
Part of the tragedy of Margaret is that we know what kind of adult
she wants to be.
“Who knows what they wanna be when they’re 17?”
“I do.”
“Really?”
“Aerospace engineer. Specifically, a NASA mission specialist.”
The math and science genius’ ambitions involve going as far beyond
her small town as a human being can go.
[Muffled voice] “It’s one small step for Margaret.”
“No! Don’t ruin it!”
But when she’s offered an actual chance to get away -- when Mark suggests flying
to Tokyo could break the time-loop -- she bails.
“Margaret, are you okay?”
Her desire to explore and achieve is inextricably linked with facing a day
without her mother; so her grief keeps her from staying on that plane --
literally preventing her from moving toward her future.
After Margaret finds the dog, she has an epiphany while immersed
in a different kind of not-quite-real life: a video game.
She understands that if she continues to live in her grief,
she won’t really be living.
“So terrible to lose someone. And if you don’t face it,
if you don’t deal with it, then… you just end up
losing yourself too.”
She takes the brave step of discussing her feelings openly
with her mom on her deathbed.
And it’s then that Margaret’s mom helps her to see time’s forward motion
in a positive light: time may be passing us
with every second, but at the same time,
we’re accumulating experiences that add up to a life well-lived.
[Whispers] “It’s true that we’re losing time every day, all the time,
until one day it’s all gone, but you’re gaining it too.”
By appreciating and “collecting” perfect moments,
we can feel satisfied with how we’ve used our time.
It’s not simply accepting her mother’s death that breaks
the time-loop, though.
What’s more important is that this acceptance breaks Margaret’s paralysis.
“There’s something missing and it’s time.”
While the other tiny perfect things on Mark’s and Margaret’s map are
things that happen around them every single day,
the final missing moment is something she has to do.
She has to seize her agency -- both to initiate the kiss with Mark,
and to resolve the time-loop.
“That was kinda perfect.”
“… There was a hair in my mouth.” [Both laughing]
[Music]
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things applies the time-loop concept
to teenagers, who just so happen to be at the age when our concept of time
begins to change.
Evidence has shown that the older you get,
the quicker you perceive time moving, and the acceleration begins
in your teenage years.
The story gives us a refreshingly youthful perspective on time,
with characters who are confronting a whole adult future ahead of them,
trying to understand what time really is how we should use it.
“I was hoping we could have a talk… about your future.”
“I’m so glad you brought that up, because I’ve actually been considering
joining the priesthood.”
While characters like Phil Connors or Tom Cruise’s William Cage may find it
hellish to be stuck in their day, at first for Mark and Margaret,
this may not seem like such a bad scenario: to be forever young with no
consequences or responsibilities.
“We’re free! Free from getting older, from going to school,
from climate change, cancer.”
Eventually, though, Mark realizes he’s terrified
by the idea of not growing up.
We might hate to think of time slipping away and making us older,
but it’s far worse to think of not being able to do all the things
you can with a future ahead of you.
“We’re saying goodbye to the rest of our lives.
We will never do anything that takes longer than 16 hours.”
Your teenage years are also when you start to realize
what your place in the world is and make choices that will
determine your future.
You go from being a spectator to an active participant
shaping your life.
When Margaret and Mark begin to search for the perfect things,
they’re still spectators, simply watching these moments happen.
But when they participate, The moments change.
Witnessing the handyman playing the piano might be wonderful for them,
but at first he finishes his performance looking kind of upset.
When Mark decides to applaud this performance,
the moment becomes richer.
Every morning, Mark has been waking up just in time
to see his mother drive away --
“Yeah, my mom… works late tonight, so I basically never see her…
which is kinda the hardest part of this whole thing.”
-- but if he hustles enough, he gets to give her a big hug
and show her just how much he appreciates her.
These sequences also remind us how much humans need other humans
to enrich our lives.
Really, the answer was in front of them all along.
They spend the movie creating a map of perfect moments,
without realizing that maps are there for you to follow.
“Woah, it’s the map! I was so lost before.”
[Whispers] “I think Mark might have been right about something.”
When Margaret does, she finds her long sought-after fourth-dimension --
“You could see everything from in there. You could see inside things,
You could never get lost.
It’s like the whole world is a map of itself.”
-- as she moves from Mark’s drawing, to visiting the site of each moment,
to watching the lines and shadows line up on the wall in front of her.
“There’s one missing.”
The map is a metaphor for the future that lies ahead of her,
with every tiny perfect moment running the whole gamut of
human experience.
The future ceases to be something to be afraid of,
and instead turns into something she’s looked for her entire time.
[Whispers] “You have everything, and it costs you everything,
but it’s worth it, I promise.”
The key idea to The Map of Tiny Perfect Things
is that limitless time is, ultimately, worthless.
Time is valuable because it’s not a renewable resource.
[Whispers] “We have all the time in the world.”
“No, we don’t. Time is the stuff that
when you spend it, you don’t get it back.”
Every moment is precious because it happens just once,
and has the potential to pull us out of our mundane routines
into something more miraculous.
“Most of life is just junk, right? It’s f -- it’s filler?
And then there’s these moments, when all the randomness
turns into something… perfect.”
Crucially, it’s the epiphany that you can create these moments yourself
that makes time truly feel full.
In the end, it all comes down to the question of whether you can
change the world --
“I was gonna try and -- and cure cancer, like that’s what this is all for,
and then when I figured it out, time would start up again,
and I would have basically saved the entire world.”
-- a problem that no doubt feels more daunting than ever
for today’s young people as we face global existential
challenges, like climate change.
“I know about the climate… I am woke!”
But sometimes, the best way to tackle overwhelmingly big problems
is to start small -- with something tiny and perfect.
Mark may not be able to cure cancer, but he can help Margaret
through her grief.
Margaret may not be able to stop her mother’s death,
but she can be a force for positivity in the future --
even by doing something as small as returning someone’s lost dog.
So, what did you think of The Map of Tiny Perfect Things?
Let us know in the comments, and be sure to subscribe to the
Amazon Prime Video Channel!
[Music]