Florence Pugh Shines in the Artful Romantic Drama We Live in Time
When making a romantic drama, one could take the sweeping melodrama route (like It Ends With Us) or turn the volume down and go for something sparer (like Weekend). Tacking a course between those poles can prove trickier; sappiness and solemnity don’t often mix well. And yet in the new film We Live in Time, which premiered here at the Toronto Film Festival on Friday, director John Crowley and screenwriter Nick Payne manage to find a steady middle ground, achieving a kind of sober sentimentality.
The film opens on a scene of contented domesticity. A woman, Almut (Florence Pugh), gathers cooking supplies—herbs, freshly laid eggs—from the lush garden beside her lovely country cottage. She goes inside to whip up some food and wake up her sleepy husband, Tobias (Andrew Garfield). It’s a hushed, quotidian moment of intimacy, woozily shot by Stuart Bentley and scored dreamily by Bryce Dessner. Here is a happy couple, swaddled inside routine.
Then the film cuts to another time, later it seems, when the pair are seated in a doctor’s office as Almut receives the terrible news that her cancer has returned and her treatment options will be brutal. A hard conversation about quality of life ensues, the film revealing its sharper edges, its interest in complicated conversation. Pugh is pragmatic, blunt; Garfield is the weepier one.
We Live in Time then travels back to tell the story of two great beginnings. There is the requisite meet cute—in this case, Almut, a chef, hits Tobias, an IT guy for Wheatabix, with her car—that blossoms into a heady love affair. The first early speed bump is Tobias and Almut’s differing opinions about having children. A pregnancy does happen, delineated in the film’s most comedic stretches—this is a film with an antic-sweet birth sequence, a hallmark of the genre.
The film is an elegant jumble of these crucial moments in a partnership’s development. Its beats are too specific to be exactly generic, but certainly they hew to a well-tested formula. Were the film told linearly, I wonder if it would seem quite as fresh. A change of structure would at least not dim the charge of Payne’s often clever and piercing dialogue, nor the winsomely naturalistic performances of its two stars.
Garfield, who has perhaps the most enviable hair in the business, uses his still signature appeal—the slight crack in his voice, his watery eyes and crinkled smile—to create a credibly decent guy who is above all else a devotee of love. Pugh gets to play with more mettle and independence, more clearly drawn conflict. She is a marvel in the film, liquidly reactive to each change in emotional weather.
We Live in Time finds much of its insight in Almut’s complex motivation, the tug of war between her duties to family and her own ambition—both terribly compromised by her health. Almut is frightened that if she walks away from her career she will leave no legacy behind, and thus nothing that might help her child understand her mother’s individual life and spirit. It’s an interesting way to approach a common movie tension; self-interest is viewed not as solipsistic distraction but almost as an imparted lesson.
The way the film chews over matters of parenting—or the decision not to parent—may favor the traditional form a bit too heavily. Adoption is never mentioned as a possibility, nor is Almut’s hesitation about having a baby at all treated with quite the same respect as Tobias’s desire to be a father. Payne uses his chopped-up technique to skip over some difficult, life-altering conversations, giving us the idea of a relationship’s rift but not exactly showing the mechanics of how those problems were worked out.
Crowley and Payne’s nonlinear approach also undercuts some of the dramatic impact of the film. We are aware of the existence of a child before we see the argument about having children. The film shows Almut’s second diagnosis well before her first. When developments and conclusions are foregone like that, there is little room for joyful surprise or the crushing thud of new and devastating information (the way diagnoses like this would arrive in real life). I like much of the film’s drifting and darting cadence, but it forces us into a more objective vantage point.
The movie remains broadly appealing nonetheless, endearing us to two people and making us ache for them as life’s inevitable ravages bear down upon them. There is also its nimble humor, its refreshingly frank and positive depictions of sex—perhaps we are finally turning a corner on that whole issue. And there is the remarkable Pugh, doing so much to deeply humanize a story of pretty people in pretty places and ever so slightly contrived circumstances. Through her we feel the movie’s most ardent passion, its most bitter sorrow. She presents a palpable life, wholly realized but fleeting.
