Review: We Live in Time

Director:  John Crowley

Stars:  Florence Pugh, Andrew Garfield, Lee Braithwaite

You’ve been invited into an unfamiliar living room to wait. A family acquaintance, say, or a friend of a friend. And you’ve been left unattended while drinks are made or a call is answered. You wander idly, looking at the decor, the names of the books on the shelves. And something catches your eye. An analogue touchstone; a family album. A romantic physical love letter to past remembrances. With no sign of anyone returning, you feel emboldened to take a peek. Inside, actual photographs of a life unknown to you. But, where the conventional thing might be to chart the passing of time, these have been presented out of order. Sentiments overlay one another. Dizzy little memories.

That’s sort of how We Live in Time feels, a throwback weepie from John Crowley that seems like the kind of picture people say “they just don’t make anymore”. Like a more-earnest, less-contemptibly-smug Richard Curtis picture, Crowley’s feature takes a tragic romance between two exceptionally cute hetero-normative white middle-class Brits and throws the pieces up in the air.

Florence Pugh’s Alma and Andrew Garfield’s Tobias are our M&S-coded lovers and the cheesily-titled We Live in Time views their relationship at three key stages in its development, showing their accident-prone meet-cute (she runs him over when he drops his chocolate orange), the struggles of an unlikely pregnancy and, later, Alma’s (second) brush with ovarian cancer that threatens to upend their family in more ways than one. Mixing the timeline of events up runs the risk of creating tonal and dramaturgical incoherence, but Crowley rightly rests a lot of confidence on the chemistry and star-power of his eminently likeable leads.

What unfolds often plays like a Best Of compilation of romantic drama staples – something that rather compliments the hodgepodge selection box chronology. We’re presented the looming threat of Alma’s cancer very early on, long before its been particularly established how these two ever became a couple, while some on-the-nose dialogue during a (classic) public make-up scene underscores the through-line philosophy of living in the moment, regardless of when that moment is. So We Live In Time deals in immediacy, gifting us the rose-tinted best version of all of it’s myriad key scenes.

Pugh and Garfield are adorable together, and go a long way to selling the movie’s broad-stroke sentimentality. The story and dramatic beats tend to be weighted more toward Alma as she juggles the needs of a relationship (and, later, burgeoning family) with the rewards of her profession (she’s a world class chef with a prestigious history in an entirely different field). By comparison, Tobias is Mr Regular. As if to make a joke of this, he’s literally a data analyst for Weetabix. An average Joe with tickbox romantic and family goals. His neat, dependableness isn’t too neat (we meet him in the process of divorce), but he becomes the comfortingly rod juxtaposed against Alma’s fast-burning overachiever. And the actors couldn’t be more suited to their positions in this dynamic. 

Pugh calibrates tactfully to the emotional reality of being diagnosed with and living with serious illness. She plays it like she owes a debt to those who have been through such things, and the everyday hero vibes of the piece are present and correct without pushing too hard into the contrived or syrupy. This couldn’t be more prominent in the barnstorming labour sequence, which is just humdrum enough to feel quintessentially British, but which carries itself on the wherewithal and kindness of strangers. 

While this one’s effectively a two-hander, there are some memorable turns in the supporting cast. Particularly of note is Lee Braithwaite as Alma’s young protege Jade, given nominally more to do than most thanks to one of the staples of the romantic drama; The Secret. Commendably, when it comes to the finale, Crowley and screenwriter Nick Payne eschew a number of cliché conventions. The results of a competition are immaterial, and a seemingly inevitable parting is relayed through a wordless and deft use of space. We Live in Time doesn’t need to wring melodrama from its situations; most of its binding sentiments can be read in the watery eyes of Andrew Garfield. 

There are no surprises here other than how smoothly everything is presented. The comedic beats are plentiful and charming in a way that bypasses the mawkish (almost unheard of in modern British cinema), the emotions are raw but not manipulative. If these choices make We Live In Time a little risk-averse, so be it. This is high quality comfort cinema. The kind of thing we’ve all seen done badly, done well for a change. Sometimes that’s quite enough.