We Live in Time Asks Too Much of Us

In the movies, it’s always enormously happy people who die from cancer: people with adoring spouses or partners, with darling children whom they love dearly, with jobs they must reluctantly step away from and houses so cozy they practically whisper, “Please don’t go.” That’s not necessarily a flaw—maybe it’s more of a virtue, a way of reminding those of us who don’t have all those things (who among us really has it all, all the time?) that even the imperfection of our lives is worth hanging onto. You imagine how you’d feel if you suddenly knew you could lose it all, and your sense of gratitude blossoms. This is how movies work on us. It’s why we surrender to them time and again.

Yet there are times when that surrender comes with misgivings attached. John Crowley’s We Live in Time offers us a piercing what-if: What if, after a recurrence of cancer, knowing all too well the hell of treatments that awaits you, you just decided to live your life to the fullest, to commit totally to your partner, to reach for a pinnacle of career success you never thought you’d achieve? That’s the choice made by Almut, played by Florence Pugh, in We Live in Time. Almut, in her late thirties, is happily partnered with Tobias (Andrew Garfield), with whom she has a child, Ella. She’s a successful chef with a loyal staff, chief among them Lee Braithwaite’s Jade. She’s built a warm, wonderful home for her little family—even though Tobias is an active, doting father, somehow you know the welcoming nature of their house is her handiwork. Early in the film, she learns that the ovarian cancer for which she’d been previously treated has come back. This prompts her to ask, how does she want to live? Does she want to struggle, again, through debilitating treatments that might not even work? Or does she want to go out in a blaze of full-on living, enjoying her child, her partner, her life, with every fiber of her being? Almut does decide to go ahead with treatment, but she also rushes forward to make the most of her remaining time. Unbeknownst to Tobias, she enters a prestigious international cooking competition, even though the schedule will be grueling. Late in the film, she explains why—but only after her decision has maybe worn us down, too.

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We Live in Time is designed to get the waterworks going. At the promotional screening I attended, audience members were given packets of tissues, and the sniffling I heard in the theater suggested they were needed. Whatever its faults may be, there are ways in which the movie is truly effective: for one thing, Garfield and Pugh are enormously vital and appealing performers; the last thing you want for them is emotional anguish. This, also, is how movies work on us: we know it’s not the actors who are suffering, only their characters, but still, we can hardly bear it. Such beautiful, endearing people shouldn’t have to bear trauma like we do—yet as they remind us, no human can escape it.

We need good melodramas, especially ones with elements of romantic comedy built in, and I wanted to love We Live in Time. But its cracks kept coming to the fore. Crowley, director of 2015’s fine Colm Tòibin adaptation Brooklyn, has worked with Garfield before: the actor made his film debut in Crowley’s 2007 Boy A, about a young man who’s released from prison after serving time for a violent act he allegedly committed when still a child. The script for We Live in Time, by Nick Payne (the creator and writer of Wanderlust), tells the story of Almut and Tobias in mix-and-match, rather than linear, fashion.

Time zips forward and back: We learn about Almut’s second cancer diagnosis before we know anything about how she and Tobias got together. It turns out that Almut hit Tobias with her car—he’s clearly bruised up but not badly hurt—and she felt so badly she stuck around the hospital to make sure he was OK. Tobias is an IT guy at Weetabix when we meet him, and though we know almost nothing about his work life, we learn a lot about Almut’s. She’s a gifted chef, and an understandably ambitious one. She and Tobias begin dating, tentatively. Things are going great, until they aren’t. Tobias definitely wants children; Almut is noncommittal. They bicker, break up, and reconcile. Almut is diagnosed with cancer for the first time. After her treatment, the two try to conceive a child—it takes a while, but little Ella finally arrives, making an unexpected entrance that’s both triumphant and humble. It’s the movie’s funniest sequence, if also its most nerve-jangling.

Those snapshots of life are what work best in the film. What’s harder to buy is Almut’s motivation for entering that contest. Of course, a movie character who’s diagnosed with cancer should follow her dreams! But little Ella feels like the movie’s afterthought. There are very few scenes of Almut interacting with her at all; Garfield has a few more, but not many. It’s costly, and complex, to make a movie with child actors. The real problem is that the movie puts us in the position of judging some of Almut’s choices. What moviegoer wants that responsibility? Almut's motivations—for lying to Tobias about that cooking competition, which also means spending less time with her child—don’t ring true. The idea, possibly, is that you don’t necessarily have to like everything about a character, even though she has cancer. But the writing tips the scales too heavily against Almut—especially when the person she’s hurting the most is played by Garfield.

Whether Crowley intended it or not, most of the movie’s emotional currents are channeled through Garfield’s face. When Almut says something particularly hurtful, we see ripples of bewilderment cross his brow; occasionally—perhaps not often enough—anger flashes his eyes. Mostly, though, his face conveys a delicate emotional complexity: incipient sorrow, the waiting-for-it-to-happen stage, the state of being in which you know—yet can’t fully fathom—that the person you love best is drifting away from you, and not willingly. Pugh is both charming and feisty as a performer—her elegant-brat portrayal of Amy March in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women was a spectacular feat of bringing something both fresh and true to a character many of us have known since childhood. But it’s Garfield who carries We Live in Time. If you end up needing those tissues, it could be because of him.