I’ve never liked this type of overly emotional and intense type of movie that is also considered a great advertisement for a fabric softener. While the movie We Live in Time has remarkable, real performances by its stars Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, it sadly falls into the category of films that try to manipulate the audience ever so slightly. Moreover making the plot even worse is the fact that the film decides to present the storyline in a non-linear structure instead. The film fails to incorporate the narrative by portraying relationships in comedies and romance when a key part of it is a stage 3 cancer diagnosis. This is not something that can be given away as it is instead revealed at a very early point in the film.
The Cancer diagnosis isn’t even the only stressful thing involved as there is a big chance that it fails to sell the movie. Their first meeting as well as the movie offer us high action as they build suspense. It reaches untold breaking points and only the 3rd stage cancer diagnosis is left. Pugh and Garfield perform well both individually and as a collaborative unit and perhaps that’s what was missing from the film for true fans. But apparently, the screenplay was built around their relationship and the film tried to brutally jump to extremely emotional parts be it 2023 or 2013. With no connections as to where the plot begins and ends.
I don’t find this non-linear method to be effective most of the time. For 2024, there’s one film where this approach was needed and where it was within the film ( The Outrun ). We Live In Time is therefore not the second one.
We Live in Time revolves around three significant portions of Almut, Pugh (the female lead), and her significant other, fo Tobias played by Garfield. It starts with a sort of a ‘meet cute’ scene for instance: Almut runs over Tobias with her car and drives him to the hospital. Feeling sorry for what she did, which to be fair she was more at fault than him, she offers to buy him a meal at her restaurant where she works as the chef. Act II shifts focus on the couple and commences with their efforts to get pregnant. Act III portrays their quite realistic experiences with Almut’s cancer diagnosis, dealing with massive life crises such as career and how to explain it to their daughter Ella (Grace Delaney). These scenes are painfully tragic because they speak about the realities of dealing with cancer and the many humiliating aspects of it.
I guess the purpose of portraying We Live in Time the way it has been presented by writer Nick Payne and director John Crowley is to imitate taking a journey inside Tobias’ head – the film is a jumble of scenes wishing to be interpreted from his point of view (although at times it deviates from this writing approach and shows events and views he cannot see). And, that of course, while the inception of such stylistic sophistication may work well on paper, the idea nevertheless gives rise to the sore tummy on the teaser and at times complex plot structure. There are, for example, “clues” of the time setting, such as Pugh’s bald head while Almut has chemotherapeutic treatment, her prosthetic belly, which is visibly pregnant, and Almut’s bald head, and so on. The more those fictional facts, the more active the mind is. Especially during its low points, due to lack of humor, the plot requires more emotional push rather than logical conclusion.
There are detached moments when We Live in Time hits the jackpot. One montage stands out to me: Almut and Tobias, trying to conceive a child, undergo the complete cycle of being unsuccessful: the multiple negative pregnancy tests, the visits to the laboratory, the fertility procedures… These scenes I know also from personal experience, how right they are. But after showing the elating moment when the pregnancy test shows a positive sign, the film cuts to a bearable childbirth scene that appears to have been dumped by a washed-up sitcom series.
In the late nineties, Nicholaus Sparks seems to have been a household name, alongside Nick Cassavetes, who made a successful adaptation of Sparks’ bestseller The Notebook. Appearing shortly after Cassavetes’ work sparked a wave of tear-jerking films and books, which appears to have no end. As time progressed, however, this type of overbearing manipulation began to disappear from movie screens; We Live in Time, on the other hand, feels like an old classic. This isn’t necessarily a negative thing- everybody needs to get a good cry once in a while, right? but the film sometimes overplays its efforts to switch on the floodgates and diverts focus from the leads’ performances to its structure. Some may ignore the film’s shortcomings, likely through the use of a small pack of tissues however I am left wondering what the long-term outcome, if any, of narrating the same tale traditionally would have been.
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