Now, I’m an easy mark when it comes to emotional manipulation. I’ll cry at a sweet commercial. I’ll cry at unearned sad scenes in movies that I actively hate. Shoot, I even got misty-eyed at the opening credits of Top Gun: Maverick when I recognized Harold Faltermeyer’s score. So when I saw the trailer for We Live in Time, a tragic, cancer-laced romance with two very appealing leads, it totally had me. But when I finally saw the movie and the closing credits were rolling, I looked at my friend John, my default weepie date, and said, “Are your eyes wet?” He looked at me and said flatly, “No. Are yours?” “No.” I answered. We both shrugged.
It’s hard to pinpoint why We Live in Time just didn’t work for me. After all, it stars Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, two actors that have impressed me in many of their films. Andrew is a cutie-pie who is not afraid of being vulnerable, and Florence is a screen powerhouse, with a maturity beyond her years. But the movie chooses a wonky blender-timeline that maybe is intended to soften the cinematic trajectory. It shuffles the highs and lows of the pair’s relationship, the starts and ends, the causes and effects—culminating in a film that is confusing and sometimes kind of exasperating.
The two, we learn, met cute (ouch!) when Almut (Pugh), a chef, accidently ran over Tobias (Garfield), an office worker for a cereal company. But we don’t necessarily see this scene up front. We see a scene, say, of the couple fighting. Then they are having a conversation with their young child. Then they are on a first date. Then she is barfing from cancer treatment. Or maybe from pregnancy. Then he meets her roommates. Then she is opening her restaurant. Etc. Etc.
It takes at least the first half of the movie to get used these jarring jumps in time. For half of a scene, as a viewer I was just trying to grasp something, anything, for context and placement. At the end, I was still unsure whether their whirlwind romance was a handful of years or maybe even a decade (so says the movie description!). Youthful Garfield has the same stubbly facial hair and weepy eyes in every scene (he always seems to be welling up in frustration, sadness, or love) no matter what the era, and Pugh’s changing hairstyles didn’t offer much help unless her head was shaved from cancer treatment (I know, I know, that sounds crass, but at least it was a visual clue).
There is a scene that teases at a more interesting movie: Tobias meets Almut’s big family for the first time, and they casually mention that she was a competitive figure skater in her teens. The vibe at the dinner table suddenly becomes super-loaded with awkwardness when it is clear that Tobias didn’t know about this. The family is surprised. He is angry. And she’s super-defensive… she locked away this part of her history as it represented a time in her life that has become painful for her, for personal reasons. When everyone at the table looks at each other uncomfortably, the scene suddenly crackles, giving us a peek at a much more intriguing, much more three-dimensional story.
That moment made me realize what was missing for me: We only know Almut and Tobias in the immediate context of their relationship, and what they offer to each other in their shared (yet shuffled) present tense. The characters (and actors, for that matter) aren’t given that three-dimensional space to work in, where each character has personal baggage from their unique and separate pasts that shape not just their shared present, but their future. Without that level of richness of storytelling, Almut and Tobias’ tale just falls flat.
