One moment, award-winning chef Almut (Florence Pugh) wakes up her lover Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and asks him to taste her latest concoction, and the next moment, in the middle of the night, Almut, now pregnant, sits on the toilet while he measures her contractions.
Effective love stories are made up of big moments and small moments. In We Live in Time, John Crowley pulls off what should be the best version of a typical romantic comedy, delivering all the key scenes from Almut and Tobias’ relationship—their families meeting each other, the proposal, fatherhood, divorce, cancer diagnosis, etc.—but not in that order.
It’s a clumsy way to tell a story, but Crowley is confident that the chemistry between Pugh and Garfield is so compelling that people will want to watch his film again and again, at which point the memories of Almaty and Tobias will become our memories, and the sequence will hardly matter. At least, this is one interpretation of a film by acclaimed playwright Nick Payne that feels less ambitious and less conceptual than his slim but brilliant one-act “Constellations,” a multiverse romance written in 2012, before multiverses were even a thing.
By contrast, there’s only one reality in “We Live in Time”—which is fine, because that’s how most humans live their lives—but Crowley thinks his emotional punches would be more effective if they were presented in a more strategic order. That’s still fine, because almost all storytellers arrange scenes to fit their narrative, though they rarely remix them in quite as arbitrary a way as this.
For example, minutes after the taste-test scene in bed, Tobias returns to his father’s guest room, deciding what to eat before going to work (as a lowly Weetabix employee). It’s confusing, to say the least, despite how amazingly sophisticated our brains have become at reordering disconnected stories. If you could keep track of “everything everywhere at once,” then “some things sometimes in no particular order” should be easy. But it’s not, because mapping out nonlinear narratives is a fine art (see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or anything by Atom Egoyan), and this story has a tendency to set up certain events and then never return to them.
Strip away the gimmick of the sequence, and what you’re left with is a run-of-the-mill cancer drama. At the heart of this bizarre, straight-forward A24 release is Almut’s diagnosis: Stage 3 ovarian cancer. We later learn that this is a recurrence of a previous bout with the disease, in which Almut had to decide whether to remove a single, infected ovary or her entire uterus. But we already know what they decided, as the couple have a daughter, Ella (Grace Delaney), who we see shave her mother’s head for round two.
While we’re talking about timelines, it’s worth noting that Crowley watched Andrew Garfield grow up. The director effectively discovered the future Spider-Man star at the time, first casting him as a young criminal in 2007’s “Boy A.” That means “We Live in Time” is a reunion: a more mature project for both, but also a more manipulative one, with Crowley relying partly on the chemistry between Garfield and Pugh, but also on Pine’s ability to write the most polished version of every important step in their relationship.
Rather than reveal where their decade-long love story will take them, just think of their first meeting, when Almut hits Tobias with her car. It’s a memorable first spark, to be sure, except at the point Crowley shows, where we’ve already been to the hospital, so it’s a bit confusing to know which one is the patient (hint: it’s the one in the neck brace). “Meet the cutest. Meet the cutest.” That might be the motto of a film determined to make every scene as endearing and/or engaging as possible.
Cancer is an ugly disease, and if we accept it here as more than just a tool, We Live in Time might be a relief. (On the other hand, the filmmakers seem so committed to forcing an emotional response that a terminal illness might be a page from a Nicholas Sparks comic?) Many of the moments Crowley delivers are touchstones of most people’s lives: The birth scene is a stunning one, and Tobias’s proposal—presented coyly at the end of a hallway strewn with candles and carrots—lives up to a Hugh Grant classic.
This approach gives cancer survivors a wonderful romance to cling to, even though this couple is living an idealized version of it, and ordinary people might feel like they’re doing it wrong. What “We Live in Time” does differently is take the woman’s concerns seriously. Tobias wants her to marry him and have children, but as a highly competitive, independently successful person, she has different priorities—and self-esteem to assert.
After Almut receives a second cancer diagnosis, she pulls Tobias aside and poses a hypothetical question: What if they lived the next few months to the fullest instead of undergoing 12 months of treatment? This is a clue to the logic that might be at work under the film’s bizarre timeline, in which Tobias clings to memories (the flashbacks may be his, and are mostly told from his perspective) while Almut insists on seizing every moment she has left (her commitment to the cooking competition drives the plot forward).
Who doesn't love a good cooking scene, or several? They're balanced well, sandwiched between make-up, break-ups, and kissing. And several times, Crowley teaches us the best way to crack an egg (on a flat surface). I wish there was a way to decode his movie.
