by Rob DiCristino
Bring tissues.There’s no sense in sugarcoating this: John Crawley’s We Live in Time is one of those lush, romantic, tear-jerking dramas that pits the unstoppable love shared by two beautiful people against the immovable reality of their impending loss. As we follow them from meet-cute to early coupledom to parenthood to catharsis to tragedy — although never quite in that order — Tobias and Almut (Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh) will seduce us with their chemistry and brutalize us with their despair. And whether we admit it or not, that’s what we want from the Notebooks and About Times of the world, the If I Stays and Walks to Remember. They’re roller coasters of emotion we board willingly, tickets we tear hoping to be devastated by the poetry and lyricism they use to add more profound meaning to our mundane lives. But while cynical hands at Netflix and Hallmark often churn those stories into formulaic pablum meant merely to manipulate us, Crawley’s (Brooklyn) more delicate and textured approach yields something indelible and infinitely more effective.We meet Tobias and Almut in a period of reverie, an early morning in their country cottage that finds the celebrated chef whipping up a homemade breakfast for her snoozing husband. They nuzzle and snuggle. They whisper and joke. We don’t know when or where this falls in their relationship timeline, and we soon learn that it doesn’t matter. Screenwriter Nick Payne is ditching the typical three-act rom-com structure in favor of a narrative built around emotional memory, a hazy mosaic of people, places, and events that depicts the totality of their shared life the same way they might recall it years later. In any given scene, we might be flashing to their first meeting — Almut hitting the recently-divorced Tobias with her car — or to the birth of their daughter — in a petrol station bathroom — or to the party Tobias crashes, hat in hand, to apologize for being such a belligerent asshole the week before. While it feels disorienting at first, Crowley’s eye for nuance and restraint keeps We Live in Time from spinning too many plates at once.
So, too, does a pair of outstanding performances from Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, who inject every frame of We Live in Time with a warmth and naturalism befitting actors whose talents defy dilution by the Marvel machine, actors whose wealth of industry accolades still falls short of rewarding the thoughtfulness and complexity of what we will hopefully come to call their “early career” work. While Pugh can’t help but give Almut shades of her trademark brassiness, this character isn’t one of the unruly renegades she’s gravitated toward recently; she’s an overachiever pressed for time, an artist scrambling for new inspiration before it’s too late. Pugh can — and does — command a scene with the best of them, of course, but it’s her ability to throttle down in Almut’s weaker moments that shines most here, the way her presence and body language convey her struggle to reconcile her cancer diagnosis — Don’t pretend you didn't know that was coming — with her desire to leave a lasting professional legacy for her daughter to remember her by.And then there’s Andrew Garfield as a Golden Retriever Husband for the ages, a mid-level cereal sales executive — “Wow, you must be very regular,” says Almut on their first date — perpetually scratching notes in a pocket-sized moleskine and finding himself simultaneously enchanted and repelled, to fudge Fitzgerald just a bit, by the inexhaustible variety of his wife. Already a five-tool all-star of stage and screen, Garfield finds new layers of humor, patience, and virtue as Tobias, the kind of taciturn everyman whom most female rom-com protagonists would toss over in the last act in favor of the carefree cowboy. Instead, Garfield emboldens Tobias with a moral integrity that perfectly compliments — and occasionally challenges — Almut’s self-assurance, a steadiness of heart that gives both his wife and his audience a port in We Live in Time’s endless storms. No matter where or when we jump in time, we can count on Tobias to play the emotional truth of the moment, to be a conduit for empathy and grace in the face of complexity, catastrophe, and death.And yet for all of that complexity, catastrophe, and death — this is a British cancer weepy, after all — what truly distinguishes We Live in Time from its peers is its refusal to descend into easy melodrama, to force its heroes into uncharacteristic lapses of judgment or aberrations in behavior simply because the plot demands a twist or turn every ten pages. All the tropes are there, of course — the meet-cute, the awkward proposal, the heartbreaking farewell — but they aren’t so much blocks building a screenwriting pyramid as they are stray moments in the margins of a much richer exploration of what it means to share one’s life with another person, to think back and to think ahead, to anticipate and to regret. Cancer or no cancer — but again, definitely cancer — Tobias and Almut believe they have only so much time to build something out of their Great Romance. But the juice, they learn, is in the squeeze. It’s counting contractions and cracking eggs, hosting dinners for family and eating Jaffa Cakes in the bathtub. That’s the good stuff. Don’t let it pass you by.
We Live in Time hits limited theaters on Friday, October 11th.
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