From the silent era to the Covid era, the weepie has remained one of the sturdiest of film genres. There’s typically romance and whimsy, before cancer—or some other disease—sweeps in to pull the rug out from under two lovebirds. Throw two stellar actors into the mix and the film is often a slam dunk. While John Crowley’s We Live in Time ticks all those boxes, it blunts the force of the naturalistic performances by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield as it shifts around the timeline of the story with little rhyme, reason, or rhythm.
We first meet Almut (Pugh) and Tobias (Garfield) when the former, a renowned chef, wakes the latter up to try a new type of parfait that she made. Throughout the next several minutes, the film repeatedly jumps forward in time to catch sight of a very pregnant Almut having contractions, then doubling over in pain and receiving her first diagnosis of cancer, and finally learning that the treatment she’s receiving after her cancer eventually returns isn’t working. She’s left to decide whether she should, in her words, live six intense, proactive months without chemo or 12 really shitty, passive ones with no promise of recovering.
Crowley and screenwriter Nick Payne may be assuming that most audiences will know where things are heading. But in outlining their characters’ arcs so early, the filmmakers not only deflate the emotional impact that they clearly want the rest of the film to have, but they make certain scenes irrelevant given that we already know how things will turn out.
Take the scene in which Tobias confronts Almut about a statement she made that leads him to think that she may not want children. It’s early on in their relationship, so Almut is more than a bit irked by the confrontation, even if Tobias admits that his bringing up the issue is because he’s about to fall in love with her. It’s an important, and often uncomfortable, conversation that many couples have, but in spite of Garfield and Pugh beautifully selling their characters’ understandable frustrations, we already know that they have a kid. When the film finally does return to their conflict over potentially having kids, it’s with Tobias crashing Almut’s friend’s baby shower to apologize—a scene that’s as cringe-worthy as it is painfully on the nose.
Elsewhere, less ham-fisted scenes depict Tobias and Almut’s early love affair are enlivened by Pugh and Garfield’s charm and effortless chemistry, while some of the scenes focusing on Pugh’s pregnancy and battles with cancer are deeply empathetic, and tinged with enough humor to give them some levity. But these scenes, particularly those revolving around Almut’s pregnancy, also bring about the film’s other most blatant flaw—its need to continually ramp up the dramatic stakes to such a degree that serious moments, at times, take on an unfortunate absurdity.
Not only does Almut and Tobias’s obligatory meet-cute occur during a car accident, but the first time that Almut thinks that she’s ready to give birth, Tobias must navigate out of an insanely tight parallel parking spot, crashing into the cars around him. And merely a few hours, or maybe days later, they’re stuck in traffic on the way to the hospital, forcing Almut to run out of the car and give birth in a nearby gas station bathroom. That scene is surprisingly tender and quite funny on its own, but for a film that thrives on the realism of its central couple’s relationship, these too-convenient mishaps stretch credulity more than a bit too far.
The same goes for Almut, who on top of being a world-class chef is revealed to have been a world-class figure skater when she was younger. That bit of backstory adds little to the narrative aside from fleshing out her connection to her deceased father, but in ways that could just as easily have been made through her love of cooking. The way the filmmakers see it, giving her that additional talent is to present her as even more impossibly strong and talented, deserving of all the fawning that Tobias, a simple Weetabix cereal salesman and devoted wife guy, grants her. A later plot development even has her invited onto an illustrious competitive cooking show while on chemo, lest anyone doubt what an undeniably incredible woman she is.
It’s a shame, because when We Live in Time isn’t putting hats on hats, it crafts organic, often touching depictions of romantic love across its scenes. But between the film’s needlessly complicated structure and the filmmakers’ affinity for the mawkish elsewhere, the impact of the more intimate moments that it gets right is regrettably muted. As such, We Live in Time works brilliantly in flashes but never builds to a cohesive, or emotionally satisfying, whole.
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