‘We Live in Time’ Review: Florence Pugh, Andrew Garfield Romantic Drama is Less a Tear-Jerker and More Like a Forced Extraction | TIFF

Life affirming dramas or tear-jerking romcoms should do at least one of those things—affirm life, or make you cry a little while amused by the romantic laughter of life. Films like About Time and The Notebook come to mind as successful at threading that very fine needle. But the latest purported entry into the genre, A24’s We Live in Time, takes these concepts to illogical extremes, going overboard in attempts both to affirm life and to jerk tears, resulting in a sappy, soppy film that manipulates you openly from start to finish. You would have to be dead inside to not cry when you watch—and a tremendous masochist if you’re thinking of doing so in the first place.

Florence Pugh plays Almut, an incredibly successful chef living with her romantic partner Tobias (Andrew Garfield) in the English countryside. Their garden is beautiful, with vegetables growing on vines and eggs being laid by chickens. Their little country home is beautiful, bathed with natural sunlight, and soft white satin sheets and cushions. And they, of course, are quite beautiful, both slipping easily into very early middle aged, and into each other’s embrace with an admittedly high degree of chemistry this side of Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling.

We Live In Time announces itself loudly soon after this idyllic opening scene. It is here to make you suffer. Almut keels over in pain while constructing a culinary masterpiece, and a quick visit to the hospital confirms she has cancer—for a second time. Rather than just live some dreadful 8 to 9 months, she tells Tobias in the parking lot, she wants to capital L Live six full ones. Tobias’ handsome, boyish eyes quiver and water, and instantly so do yours. Welcome to the next 105 minutes of suffering.

Director John Crowley (Brooklyn) and screenwriter Nick Payne (The Sense of an Ending) further toy with your emotions by playing around with the timeline a little. You see the couple when Almut was pregnant with their daughter, who in the original timeline is a tender four years old. You also see them in a separate timeline, when they meet by chance. The circumstances involved in each of these substories are what would one aptly described as “ridiculous” if they happened to your friend in real life. Better yet, one would say this sort of corniness only happens at the movies. The delivery of their baby is suffused with screwball comedy and improbable turns. They meet due to the fortuitous breaking of Tobias’ pencils when he was trying to sign his divorce papers and Almut running him over when he was rushing out to buy new ones.

You get the idea. We Live in Time purports to tell you a story that affirms the beauty of life, but all it ends up verifying is that there are no depths Hollywood screenwriters will not plumb for cheesy romances. At least Pugh and Garfield are a pleasure to behold aesthetically, and the film’s insistence that put all that on display side by side with their tears provides at least a distraction. But the rest of the film proceeds in similar fashion, with vignettes of particular episodes in Almut’s and Tobias’ relationship, all urging you to see this as the greatest love story—and, therefore, the greatest tragedy—ever told.

Given the stacking of cliché upon cliché, it is also hardly surprising that the script makes little attempt to give these characters any originality, or any real conflict among them (beyond the obvious problem set out at the beginning). Almut is portrayed as a fiercely independent woman, one that will not make promises about children or commit herself to anything in particular, while keeping small little secrets about her past. Tobias is even less interesting, falling hard for Almut and being a caring father and doting husband while having little desires of his own. The two never argue or have any real disagreements. By the time a real one comes well into the third act, it is too little, too late. She is suffering from a terminal disease, but their lives feel just too perfect. And whatever insightful message the film finally offers about how we may think we want to be remembered, particularly by our children, when we know we are going to die gets lost and buried in the emotional shuffle, sort of like one could bury it at the tail end of an otherwise scathing review.

Pugh and Garfield give it their all. Like the characters they portray, they are in the very early stages of middle age but have grown comfortably into their own skins as actors, indeed, as superstars, and, their chemistry is undeniable even if slightly surprising. To the extent Crowley and Payne made We Live in Time to make you cry, they undeniably succeed. But the manipulation is too extreme, the suffering far too untethered from any reason to justify it. I suppose one could say that every once in a while one just needs an “ugly cry.” If so, then We Live in Time is tailor made. It is also just about the only thing it is good for.

Grade: C

This review is from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival where We Live in Time had its world premier. A24 will release the film in the U.S. on October 11, 2024.