‘We Live in Time’ Scrambles an Out-of-Order Romantic Tragedy. The Stars Realign It
They mull over a cancer diagnosis, they dream of a bright future, they teach their five-year-old daughter how to cook, they give birth in a gas-station bathroom, they make up, they break up, they meet-cute — we can’t remember if this is the exact order of the relationship we see unfold, before quickly folding back on itself, in We Live in Time. But director John Crowley’s chronologically skewed story of two soulmates hinges on the idea that by mixing up the peaks and valleys that make up a long relationship, albeit one in which the clock keeps steadily ticking toward half past tragedy o’clock, you’re adding something unique to the subgenre of romantic weepies. Love Story taught us that love meant never having to say you’re sorry. This movie’s remixed, reordered takeaway might be that love, you’re sorry to say, never meant having forever in your corner.
So this lubricator of tear ducts revolves around a gimmick?, you could ask at this point (or, in the spirit of the movie, might inquire after getting the answer without any context 20 minutes earlier). Yes, the jumbling of information keeps you actively guessing what’s happening when, whether the two main characters — Almut (Florence Pugh), a chef, and Tobias (Andrew Garfield), a white-collar grunt at a cereal company — know the news that will change everything, and what stage of their relationship they’re in. No, that’s not why you’ll walk away from the movie red-eyed and sniffling. Screenwriter Nick Payne is best known for his 2012 play Constellations, a similar two-hander that involved a smitten couple, a shuffling off from this mortal coil, and a slightly scrambled presentation. (The 2021 revival at Donmar Warehouse, which featured four rotating duos, is available to stream at the National Theatre’s site.) Audiences didn’t flock to this award-winning British theater work because of the temporal aspect, however. They came to watch famous actors dig into a showcase that allowed them to play a satisfying arc and tug heartstrings.
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And it’s We Live In Time‘s twosome that make this worth seeking out, even if the emotional heavy lifting is slightly lopsided in terms of divisions of labor. We’ve already hung out with them as an affectionate couple, and as anxious parents-to-be, before we have the opportunity to see their initial encounter courtesy of Almut hitting Tobias with her car. (He was in his hotel robe and crossing a motorway while trying to get a pencil to sign his divorce papers. It’s, er, complicated.) We’ve eavesdropped on Almut making a case for avoiding a second go-round with chemo, despite not knowing the 411 on her first treatments, before acting as voyeurs regarding their first date at the restaurant she’s just opened. We’ve already observed them raise their young daughter, Ella (Grace Delaney), before they launch into a heated, nearly deal-breaking argument over why kids will never, ever be in the cards. The end is the middle, while the middle is the beginning, etc., etc.
In other words, We Live in Time doesn’t give us the time to get to know these two as they get to know each other, which is usually how a moviegoer would bond with these life partners as the existential curveballs get thrown and the grim reaper regrettably begins tapping his wristwatch. There’s a side plot as well, involving Almut being recruited to represent Britain in a prestigious international cooking tournament that she knows she’ll be sick to do, and that she chooses to do anyway without telling her family — a potentially alienating move for someone who, per weepie-movie tradition, is supposed to be courting our sympathies.
Hence, it’s up to Pugh to make this woman complex enough to withstand the knee-jerk sense that she’s simply being selfish (a nagging feeling that the script itself seems to support, even when Almut claims she’s doing it so her child will be proud of her decades down the road), as well as communicating the regrets and fears, the clinging to optimism and climb-every-mountain-ASAP philosophy, that begin to overtake her post-diagnosis. It’s up to Garfield to convince you that his eventual path to widower-hood, not to mention his worries over their daughter’s handling of the illness and holding his own sorrow at bay so as not to miss out on the joy of their dwindling time together, reads as authentic and earned. And it’s up to the two of them in tandem to make you believe you’re watching a real couple in love and crisis, and not just a screen couple simply rending garments and putting hand to brow.
Thankfully, these talents are well-prepped to tackle the task. Crowley worked Garfield when the young actor nabbed his first lead film role in Boy A (2007), and you can feel the actor leaning in to a role that allows him to go some deeper, possibly more painful places while still getting to play a swooning, bumbling dream guy. You feel like he’s maturing into a new, slightly less precious leading-man phase here. Pugh continues to build on a foundational talent that seems boundless, and for all of the jobs that have required her to go big on folk-horror victims, gaslit retro-wives, period-piece doyennes, and Russian-accented supervillains, she manages to dig into a “normal” everyday woman finding herself facing up to her mortality with as much gusto as possible. Who, OK, happens to be a celebrity chef and is forced to give birth in a petrol station, in what is somehow both the most acutely intense and most cutie-cute Love, Actually-type sequence in the whole film. But still. We know we sound like a broken record by once again declaring she may be the great screen actor of her generation, yet it’s hard not to think that as you watch her fill in the blanks for this less eccentric, more grounded-than-usual (for her) character and still quietly blow you away.
Come for the jumble-puzzle Scenes From a Marriage, sans an actual marriage for most of the narrative. Stay for the connection that these two communicate wonderfully enough that you almost don’t mind the storytelling mind games. (A pro-tip: If you subscribe to the reading that only the final scene takes place in the present day, and the rest of the movie is really just a flood of memories coming randomly at you as memories so often do, the formal conceit works 10 times better.) We Live in Time is an actor’s movie, by necessity if not always by design. You know where the destination ends before the movie’s even begun. Pugh and Garfield make the endgame worth the journey, no matter where you place it.
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