DAN WEBSTER:
American movie audiences seem to be most comfortable with certain kinds of romance movies. The most popular, of course, is the standard rom-com, a perfect example being the recent Sydney Sweeney/Glen Powell effort Anyone But You.
Another, though, is the mawkishly tragic type adapted from the likes of Nicholas Sparks novels. Think of the 2004 weeper The Notebook.
We Live in Time, which was directed by John Crowley from an original script by Nick Payne, is more like the latter than the former, even if it does evoke the occasional laugh. Overall, though, it does a far better job of capturing an authentic sense of what two characters experience over their several-year relationship.
Florence Pugh plays Almut and Andrew Garfleid plays Tobias. She is a chef with ambitions and he is—or becomes—the advertising face of a breakfast cereal called "Weetabix." The two meet cute when he, not paying attention, wanders into a roadway and is hit by the car Almut is driving.
From there they progress from a hospital corridor to, a while later, the restaurant where Almut works and then to Almut’s apartment where they energetically, so to speak, bond. Beyond that physical act, though, the two discover a rich emotional connection. And soon they are a couple, full of the bloom that new-found love can entail.
As happens in all relationships, they do encounter the occasional bumps, one being Tobias’ desire to have children set against Almut’s desire to focus on her career. But while they weather that obstacle well enough—reconciling in a scene reminiscent of yet another cinematic love story, 1996’s Jerry Maguire—another more serious hurdle confronts them.
And the decision made at that point ends up being one that leads to the movie’s more serious plot path, one involving the specter of cancer.
Director Crowley has ventured into the romance realm before, most notably with the 2015 Saoirse Ronan feature Brooklyn. In We Live in Time, he and screenwriter Payne follow many of the traits expected of the more serious type of romance movie. Yet one difference is how they deal with the notion of time itself.
Instead of following a straightforward plotline, their film shifts smoothly yet plausibly from present to past and back again, gradually giving us the information we need to understand the characters and their motivations.
Almut is a former figure skater, one whose ambitions in that arena died with the death of her beloved father. Yet her determination to succeed never wavers, leading to her efforts—despite her declining health—to participate in and win a European cooking competition. Tobias is far more passive, at least in terms of his career, but the affection he feels for Almut runs deep.
Instead of their differences being rendered through overly huge dramatic moments, as a more ordinary movie might portray them, what Almut and Tobias go through never seems less than real. And aside from the efforts of Crowley and Payne, credit for that falls mostly to Pugh and Garfield.
Pugh’s rose to fame in 2019 when she starred in two critically acclaimed films—the horror film Midsommar and Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women, the latter of which earned her an Oscar nomination. As Almut, she embodies all the competing emotions of someone in love yet driven to sacrifice everything to achieve something that will be her legacy.
Garfield has had his own varied career, portraying everything from the real-life World War II corpsman Desmond Doss in 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge, for which he earned the first of two Oscar nominations, to starring in a pair of films as Spider-Man. The affection his Tobias feels for Almut comes across as genuine, even given his occasional resentment over her priorities.
A standard telling of such a tale resorts to easy answers and emotional manipulation. What Crowley and company have given us makes for a more complex capturing of love and all it entails—and that makes all the difference.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.
