We Live in Time
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rated: R
Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes
Stars: Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh
Writer: Nick Payne
Director: John Crowley
Streaming on Max; for rent and purchase on Prime; for sale on Blu-ray disc
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
Perfectly timed for Valentine’s Day Weekend — and for any we’re-getting-serious date night thereafter — We Live in Time largely overcomes unnecessarily convoluted storytelling to stake its claim as the year’s most watchable weepie.
Florence Pugh (Oppenheimer) is Almut, a self-assured British chef who’s too wrapped up in her rising career to bother with a man…until she runs into (literally, with her car) Tobias (onetime Spider-Man Andrew Garfield), a soon-to-be-divorced junior executive with, of all companies, Weetabix, the oddball Depression-era breakfast cereal.
So, here you have multiple meet-cute layers: Not only does Almut nearly kill her inevitable new boyfriend by running over him on a darkened, rain-slicked street, but the pair also dwell light years from each other on the professional culinary spectrum.
In what seems an unintentional indictment of the UK health system, Tobias is sent home from the hospital that very night, despite severe lacerations, a neck brace, and, I’m guessing, probable internal injuries. But screenwriter Nick Payne (The Crown) isn’t done with the improbable set-up: Rather than taking Tobias straight home and, perhaps, sitting up with him to make sure he’s not suffered a brain bleed, Almut takes him to an all-night diner where she sips a milkshake while watching him painfully struggle to lift a fork to his mouth. In his brace and bandages, Tobias resembles Malcolm McDowell in the final scene of A Clockwork Orange — although at least in that film there was a nurse willing to offer spoon feeding. Almut, lucky to have avoided a vehicular homicide charge, seems blissfully detached in a way I’m pretty sure director John Crowley (Brooklyn) does not intend.
In a straight-up romantic comedy, we’d give this improbable set-up a quick pass, understanding it was just a madcap entrée to the zany misadventures to come. But while We Live in Time strives for occasional laughs — and largely earns them, thanks to its appealing stars — the film also labors mightily to yank tears from its audience with all the exertion of a plumber taking a plunger to a kitchen sink.
I’m no doctor, but I know there are, in filmdom, certain medical truths. Among them: One who coughs up a speck of blood will by the next reel be expiring in an oxygen tent…and a character who insists their stomach ache “is nothing” is emphatically not the victim of a rogue hot dog. The latter misfortune befalls Almut, who spends most of the movie undergoing chemotherapy, or else pregnant, or else in remission or else suffering relapse.
But not in that order, because in an effort to make We Live in Time smarter than the average romantic dramedy, the filmmakers have opted to tell the story of Almut and Tobias in a dizzyingly nonlinear fashion, hopping a decade ahead, then 12 years back, then halfway in between, and so on. Sometimes they’ve just met; sometimes they are sitting in an oncologist’s office either learning Almut’s original prognosis or looking back on the progress of her treatment. Occasionally Almut is pregnant; or else the couple are walking through a park, holding the hands of their unreasonably adorable little girl (Grace Delaney).
For the most part, the filmmakers avoid letting the unconventional structure become too confusing — although I wish they’d employed more visual clues regarding time shifts, rather than waiting for some snippet of dialogue to illuminate just where we are in the story.
Mostly, though, the jumparound storytelling seems, while technically sophisticated, a little lazy. Parachuting into dramatic, funny, or tragic episodes of the couple’s lives, after all, eliminates the need to explain how we got to this point; what decisions were shared, what sacrifices were made? Early on, it seems like we’re going to see a lot of Tobias’s Weetabix career. But while the ensuing film traces every pore of Almut’s culinary journey, there’s not even a suggestion that Tobias has any life outside his doting devotion to his wife and daughter.
All that said, great performances can atone for a multitude of cinematic sins, and there is undeniable charm and natural ease in the chemistry between Garfield and Pugh, both former Oscar nominees. His Tobias follows the love of his life with an appealingly goofy, love-struck smile; her Almut feigns an all-business exterior that melts faster than butter in a skillet. We buy into this pair’s instant attraction immediately — a miracle when you consider the uber-manipulative plot elements the filmmakers impose upon them.
Would We Live in Time have worked better without its makers’ highfalutin’ storytelling aspirations? Maybe. But if a century of date night movies have told us anything, it’s Love Conquers All.
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