Andrew Garfield is incapable of giving a meaningless expression. When he stares — be it at a person, a doorway, or an empty bedroom — waves of anguish and hesitation break across his face. This quality can sometimes be a bit much, but it mostly serves him well in John Crowley’s tearjerking, timeline-hopping romantic drama We Live in Time, a chronicle of the eventful, years-long relationship between Weetabix sales rep Tobias (Garfield) and acclaimed chef Almut (Florence Pugh). The film jumps back and forth between scenes from the couple’s life together — their ridiculous meet cute, their torrid sex sessions, their pregnancy, their extended ordeals with Almut’s cancer. (None of these are spoilers: The movie tells the story out of order, and it basically starts with the pregnancy before cutting to the cancer diagnosis.) Scenes often begin with Tobias waking up and/or walking around with an uncertain expression on his face, before we discover where in the relationship we are exactly. It feels at times like he doesn’t know either — as if we are watching a man wander through the chambers of his grief.
That impression might also be a response to how curated and antiseptic so many of the moments in We Live in Time feel. The film’s constant leaps back and forth along its storyline are presumably meant to drive home the idea that time never seems to be enough, that these people are doomed by the unanticipated brevity of their life together. (Of course, the jumps also help obscure the fact that the movie doesn’t have much of a narrative; it’s basically Love Story without the class consciousness and with a bizarre high-end international cooking competition tacked on.) Every instance we see from Tobias and Almut’s lives feels important; every exchange feels capitalized; every scene tells us exactly what to feel. We get that these two people loved each other very much; even their occasional relationship strife seems rooted in the fact that they love each other so, so much. But time together also means wasting time, and we rarely see anyone at ease in this picture. We rarely discover anything about these people.
The actors, luckily, are a pleasure to watch. Pugh is a sparkplug of desires and dreams, and she gives Almut a plucky restlessness that helps sell some of the script’s later, odder choices. The buzz of activity she carries around with her makes an interesting contrast with Garfield’s sorrowful spectatorship over this romantic tragedy. Does it make for anything resembling chemistry? I never really bought the onscreen relationship in We Live in Time, in part because I could constantly feel the movie trying too hard. The love story is syrupy, and the tragedy even more syrupy. In a picture supposedly loaded with such anguish, one yearns for something raw and genuine. But the best the film can muster up is an extended, slapsticky childbirth scene in a gas station that feels more like an R-rated variation on something from an old Hugh Grant rom-com.
Director Crowley is no stranger to the romantic drama: He made 2015’s Best Picture nominee Brooklyn, which also took a seemingly familiar premise but found ways to breathe fresh life into it. There, his manicured classicism worked wonders. Here he’s working from a script by acclaimed British playwright Nick Payne that feels at times like it would work better on the stage — where the enclosed atmosphere and the spare settings might justify the momentousness of every scene, and where the film’s unique structure, crossed with the immediacy of live theater, might feel a bit bolder. At the same time, it’s hard to argue against onscreen tragedy: If it breaks you, it breaks you, and there was plenty of sobbing at the end of my packed Toronto International Film Festival screening. My cold, cold heart, alas, was unmoved.
