We Live in Time is in cinemas from New Year’s Day. Add it to your watchlist
A cast you want to spend time can be the saving grace of many a flawed romantic melodrama. While Brooklyn director John Crowley’s seventh feature is a considered and classy tear-jerker, it also arrives laden with overcooked metaphors (eggs are on the menu) and scrambled plot convolutions. But these excesses serve at least one welcome purpose: they make you appreciate how good Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are in the lead roles.
Pugh plays Almut and Andrew plays Tobias, a couple whose partnership is fraught with coincidences and kitchen-based contrasts. She’s a high-grade chef who knows the best way to crack an egg; he knows his way around a cereal box, presumably, since he works for Weetabix. They fall in love, then fall out before reconnecting and debating whether to have a child and get married. But a crisis unfolds when Almut is diagnosed and treated for ovarian cancer, which reoccurs after the couple have a daughter.
Florence Pugh as Almut and Andrew Garfield as Tobias in We Live in Time. A24Scripted by playwright and screenwriter Nick Payne, this relatively straightforward set-up becomes more complicated in action. The story unfurls in non-chronological order, so that viewers need to figure out by visual cues where the narrative is in Almut and Tobias’s journey at any given time. Under Crowley’s elegant direction, Almut’s hair is one reliable steer and Tobias’s injuries are another, given the nature of the film’s meet-cute: a collision that occurs as he pops out of a hotel room in his dressing gown to buy pens and gets hit by a car. Guess who’s driving.
This pile-up of circumstances typifies a tendency towards contrivance in Payne’s script. The issue extends to the dialogue, which ranges from Tobias’s faltering, Richard Curtis-esque declaration of love to a fall-out in which his syntax comes out mangled. When he tells Almut that their conflict “a lot, hurt,” it’s hard not to wonder why Payne’s insistence on putting things in the wrong order needed this oddly Yoda-esque spin.
Florence Pugh as Almut and Andrew Garfield as Tobias in We Live in Time. A24If Payne sometimes gets away with these quirks, it’s at least partly due to the leads. Garfield’s pliable ease of emotional expression proves instantly endearing. Pugh is also hugely impressive in a role that tests her character in many ways — terminal illness, figure-skating, childbirth in a garage restroom and wrestling with an octopus in a global cookery contest all feature. The supports square up, too. While Grace Delaney proves duly heart-melting as the couple’s daughter, Lee Braithwaite’s capable turn as Almut’s commis chef suggests bigger roles may beckon in the future.
Florence Pugh as Almut and Andrew Garfield as Tobias in We Live in Time. A24Meanwhile, Payne’s decision to scramble up past, present and future seems distractingly at odds with the kind of romantic weepie that needs to get to the heart of the matter. In fairness, what he’s trying to do almost becomes clear when Almut lays out her options after her cancer diagnosis. Does she want to spend six months doing something amazing that she loves, like the international Bocuse d’Or chef championship, or 12 months struggling with treatment that may not work? How will this time be best remembered, by her or her loved ones?
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