There’s a particular brand of weepy drama that is always bound to get me. A good amount of resilience, a healthy dose of stiff upper lips in the face of abject tragedy – do it even remotely well, and you’ve got me. I’ll be crying in that theater.
“We Live in Time,” directed by John Crowley and written by Nick Payne, does it more than remotely well. One part romance, one part melodrama, and one part cooking show (I’m very serious), “We Live in Time” can be predictable, and you can sometimes feel the gears turning, urging your tear ducts to release. But, there are enough moments that don’t take the typical route towards their emotional endpoints – and when you add two wonderful actors to the mix, just because you can feel the manipulations doesn’t stop them from working.
“We Live in Time’ unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, exploring the relationship between Almut (Florence Pugh), a chef and restaurant owner, and Tobias (Andrew Garfield), a breakfast cereal representative and recent divorcee. After a chance encounter involving a car accident, Almut and Tobias’ relationship spans years of ups and downs – most notably, Almut’s battle with ovarian cancer and the toll it takes on the couple.
The nonlinear narrative of “We Live in Time” might feel a little gimmicky on its face, but it’s never used as a way to obscure important information, or to make any of the film’s reveals feel more dramatic than they are (we know very early on that Almut and Tobias have a child, and the fact of Almut’s cancer is revealed in one of the film’s first scenes – two of the most important aspects of their relationship revealed right away). Instead, the time hopping functions best as a sort of commentary on memory. Life is made up of important and unimportant events alike, and you don’t always remember them in perfect detail or in the right order. Particularly when someone is gone, or you’re in the middle of a hard time, you tend to remember things in a sort of beautiful haze – Stuart Bentley’s lovely cinematography puts a fine point on that visually.
The character beats are familiar, the push and pull between Almut and Tobias recognizable, even if we might be used to seeing some of their traits switched around. She’s tough and ambitious, already the owner of a restaurant at a young age. He’s sensitive and practical, the type of guy to keep copious amounts of lists, the type to constantly wear a stopwatch around his neck when his wife is pregnant in case he suddenly needs to time the space between contractions. At one of their first parties together, he stands off to the side in the kitchen nursing a beer while she lights up the room. He wants kids, she isn’t all that interested until her cancer might take the choice away from her altogether.
There’s nothing all that radical about any of this, and “We Live in Time” doesn’t try to hide the fact that this is all heading toward a tragic ending. The onus, then, falls onto the script to find stirring ways to relay the story, and on the actors to elevate the material. Pugh has delivered upon an interesting mixture of toughness and sensitivity. Almut’s vulnerability springs out of her desire not to be vulnerable, and Pugh’s expressive face captures the complexity in that paradox. But it’s really Garfield who comes across as the heart of the film – I can’t think of another actor who reads as so innately good, who radiates such a level of warmth by simply existing.
Payne’s script can be hit or miss in its attempts to find ways to make the emotion feel natural. One of the film’s big conflicts is Almut’s desire to compete in a cooking competition called the Bocuse d’Or, her fear of leaving the world behind with nothing to show for it butting up against Tobias’ worries about her health. Pugh has a climactic monologue that she delivers well, but very overtly articulates the reality of Almut’s ambition and her fear in a way that’s a little unnecessary, particularly when it’s been present in Pugh’s performance the entire time. It’s a big moment, but it feels a little forced.
“We Live in Time” is at its best when it avoids that tendency to go big. After Almut tells Tobias that she’s not sure if she wants to go through chemotherapy for the second time, he writes her a letter. He stages a big, romantic gesture – candles, flowers, the whole nine yards – and intends to read her the letter, which contains the thoughts he wasn’t able to get out earlier. But even now, he still can’t make it past the first word (“Although”), his voice cracking and his hands shaking as he tries again and again. Almut silently takes the letter from him and reads it without a word. The emotion doesn’t have to be articulated, just felt.