By Sandra Hall
WE LIVE IN TIME ★★★½
(M) 108 minutes
We Live in Time has much in common with the Richard Curtis brand of British romcom. It does a nice line in deadpan jokes, and London’s potential as a lovers’ playground is fully exploited in a way that avoids any hint of the travelogue.
Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in We Live in Time.Credit: Peter Mountain
But the film’s director, John Crowley (Brooklyn), and screenwriter, playwright Nick Payne, have more elaborate ambitions than Curtis has ever shown. Their theme is time and its functions as both healer and destroyer. And they’ve complicated the exercise by dumping all thought of chronology. The script is chopped into a series of snapshots tossed onto the screen like an undressed salad.
We begin in the middle. When we first meet Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and his partner, Almut (Florence Pugh), they have moved out of London to a photogenic cottage in the country to raise their child. Almut is about to suffer a second bout of the ovarian cancer which threatened her life several years earlier.
Lest this make the film sound like an unrelenting weepie, you quickly learn that its tone is going to remain determinedly upbeat no matter what. The couple’s shared sense of the ridiculous soon proves robust enough to survive almost anything, and crises have a way of turning into farce. How’s this for a novel version of “meeting cute”? They’re introduced to one another one night on a freeway when her car knocks him down as he’s wandering into the traffic to retrieve a lost pen.
Traffic becomes a prominent feature in their relationship. Years later, gridlock forces them to abandon their car on their way to the maternity hospital. Almut gives birth in the bathroom of a roadside convenience store with Tobias as midwife and two shopkeepers assisting. And against all the odds, the raucous hysteria which results turns out to be pretty funny.
Almut is the dynamo – a highly successful chef running her own restaurant. And just to make sure you’re impressed, we later learn that she’s also a former figure skating champion. Tobias, in contrast, has a boring job marketing breakfast cereal, which prompts Almut’s friends to christen him “Mr. Weetabix”. But he’s kind and understanding, gets her jokes and is perfectly capable of coming up with a few good ones of his own.
As well as being likeable, he’s as brave as Almut herself but she chooses to keep him in the dark when she decides to take a big risk by competing in an international culinary contest while undergoing her course of chemotherapy.
All up, there’s enough going on in their lives without the extra complexities posed by the script’s shifts back and forth in time. While these concentrate on three specific periods, they’re a distraction – especially in the first part of the film. I felt I was being set a puzzle rather than being told a story. What’s more, it’s a puzzle which does nothing to enhance the narrative. Even after I had settled in and was more or less keeping up, the juxtapositions struck me as being clunky and jarring.
It’s all the more irritating because these hiccups are at odds with the casual wit that enlivens the dialogue and the naturalness of the performances. Despite the weightiness of the theme, Pugh and Garfield extract a lot of fun from their scenes together. They deftly sidestep any hint of sentimentality and while Pugh emerges as the film’s driving force, the quality of Garfield’s comic timing ensures that Tobias has no trouble being a match for her.
We Live in Time is released in cinemas on January 23.
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