After a decade that saw him flirt with various narrative styles – the Wes Anderson-lite Is Anybody There?, the spy thriller Closed Circuit, and the Innaritu-style crossing narratives of Intermission – John Crowley finally found a direction with Brooklyn, which was celebrated for its gentle nature and the depth of its performances. That, in turn, led him to The Goldfinch, which was a disaster so bad that Donna Tartt fired her agent and swore she’d never let anybody else bring one of her books to the screen. The issue, when looking back at that 2019 release, was that it attempted to merge Brooklyn’s quiet sensitivity with the exaggerated nature of Tartt’s plotting, which, when ripped from the page, unfolds a little too ridiculously for that tonal pairing. His latest, We Live in Time, is a return to the form that made him so successful in 2015, though, to the film’s detriment, he doesn’t totally abandon the complexity that made The Goldfish so unwieldy. No, the Met doesn’t blow up, and paintings aren’t handed out to kids, but the film’s otherwise straightforward story of a young couple’s entanglement and the illness that brings their pairing to a tragically early end is tied up in achronological narrative theatrics. What he has now that he didn’t have when adapting Tartt’s novel is two of the strongest actors working in UK cinema today – Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh – who give fantastic performances and manage to make the film land despite its maneuvering.
If you’d like to make your own cut of We Live in Time, just jumble up these summary paragraphs, and you’ll likely have a cut they abandoned at some point in the editing suite. Tobias (Garfield) is a young divorcee who works a boring job – the kind of person who realizes the hollowness of saying on camera that a major corporation “feels like family” even as he feels how false it is – and, on the night he’s about to sign the papers ending his marriage, he gets struck by a bolt from the blue, Or, actually, a Mini Cooper driven by Almut (Florence Pugh), a young chef busy readying her restaurant for its opening night. Their meet-cute occurs in a hospital waiting room and continues at a shabby roadside faux-American diner, where they find out about each other. Almut’s got big plans, and Tobias likes being with her and supporting her through it all, provided they one day have kids. But it’s all a bit too early for that to come out in conversation, and they part after Almut invites him to her restaurant’s opening night – with his wife in tow, given that he’s still sporting his ring. When the date of the dinner arrives, he shows up stag and informs her that they’ve divorced: cue the kind of aggressive, excited sex one has when they’re pent-up and free to let loose.
Years later, Almut and Tobias live in the countryside, raising their daughter, whose conception and birth were anything other than typical. Almut’s an ovarian cancer survivor now, who chose to keep one of her ovaries instead of getting a total hysterectomy to bring their daughter into the world (even the concept of having a child was a tremendous shift in perspective for her), and she’s struck at work by a familiar pain in her midsection. The pair head to the doctor and discover that the worst-case scenario has occurred: her cancer has returned, and it’s grown even larger than it did the first time around. Faced with the prospects of endless, painful treatments, Almut proposes to Tobias that they have a wonderful six months instead of a miserable year, and while on the drive home, their quiet reflection about that moment is, at least for Almut, interrupted by a text message from her former boss, inviting her to take part in the Bocuse d’Or, a cooking competition of unparalleled prestige. She thinks it’s a grand idea – a chance to leave her mark on the world before she makes her untimely exit – yet conceals it from Tobias even as he plans how he will spend these last few months with her. They have radically different ideas about what those “wonderful six months” will look like, and this disagreement gives the film its interpersonal conflict. It is very sad, as you might assume, but Crowley – or, more accurately, his two leads – gives the film a warmth and light to guide through this darkness.
Garfield and Pugh – the latter of whom probably deserves to be top-billed, given that she’s the sole dynamic character in the film – are a genuinely charming on-screen couple, and each turns in a performance worthy of praise. If there’s one quibble I have about Garfield’s performance, it’s that he plays up his meekness a little too much, leading him to be overwhelmed at every turn by Pugh’s sheer force of will, and his gentle nature occasionally comes across as passive. Tobias follows Almut wherever she goes, beyond a sole disagreement about children that’s swiftly resolved narratively (and is ultimately rendered as exposition, given the achronological nature of the storytelling), to the point that he stops existing as a character at certain moments. The resolution of their child-having argument is pulled out of a less-honest and more-formulaic film, in which he essentially pulls a Love, Actually and publicly declares his love to her while awkwardly crashing a social function (admittedly, it is funny that this happens at a baby shower for one of Almut’s friends). But Garfield is Crowley’s old hand, having made his screen debut in the director’s Boy A nearly two decades ago, and he is supposed to be properly boring to highlight better Pugh’s already-precipitous ambitions. She’s a brilliant chef and a former figure-skating star; he’s a divorcee who works for Weetabix, which is the UK’s unsatisfying answer to the question, “What if someone made protein bar-sized Frosted Mini-Wheats and forgot to put on the frosting?”
Pugh, on the other hand, elevates what’s on the page into something truly noteworthy. Almut’s aggressive combination of headstrong ambition and the skill to back it up is tragically undercut by her diagnosis, a lapse into an oft-used narrative cliché, one that forces our Icarus-like characters to watch their wings melt as they near the tops of the clouds. If she just liked music a bit more, she’d be well-suited to play the tragic girlfriend in a Cameron Crowe movie, in which her life and death are meant to uplift and forever change a boring dude to someone slightly less dull. Were it not for the film’s third act and for Pugh bringing that same semi-sarcastic yet always-deep sensibility that she does for all of her characters, Crowley would have made another entry into the Manic Pixie canon, and it’s a far better film for dabbling in that sensibility rather than stridently committing to its precise execution. Through her performance, Pugh constantly asserts that Almut is not only Tobias’s equal but is often the one leading them, and her ultimate refusal to submit, either to her illness or to the conventions of romantic comedy relationship structures, brings a different kind of life to the film than one might expect. She’s a well-rounded and complete character who demands the same respect we’d afford to a tragic male protagonist in their pursuit of doing that One Last Thing in the time they have left, and Pugh’s work here is top-notch. Don’t be surprised to see a clip of her fiery declaration of purpose amid a pivotal third-act moment resurface on ABC in February.
To misquote the Bard, I wonder if Crowley gilded the lily a bit with the film’s structure, which occasionally overcomplicates the narrative in unsatisfying ways. We Live in Time doesn’t need an additional hook: the audience is already in the theater to see two of the best British actors working today on-screen together, and it does little aside from justifying the film’s title being so unnecessarily opaque. Sure, one can see where the impact is supposed to be – a happy memory from the past undercut by the realities of the present – but the individual scenes play, for the most part, as is, with little crosscutting between time periods to sharpen the impact. One could make a chronological cut of the film effortlessly, and it simply makes you wonder why Crowley and screenwriter Nick Payne felt the need to pump the brakes so often and halt the film’s momentum. Yet they succeed despite their gimmick failing, giving us enough truly human yet fundamentally cinematic moments between these two characters to add some extra organic salt to the popcorn bucket when the tears inevitably land there. From the delightful unreality of their meeting, executed with comic perfection by the leads, to the brilliant sequence in which Almut gives birth in a gas station bathroom while Tobias and two stunned yet helpful employees do their best to help (after breaking down the bathroom door), We Live in Time is a lovely little film when it gets out of its own way and lets its complicated messiness exist in its protagonists rather than in its construction.