We Live in Time – Movie Review and Movie Summary (2024)

The mawkish romantic drama boomed in the wake of The Notebook but burned out with the numerous adaptations of other books by Nicholas Sparks and his imitators. Watching John Crowley's powerful We Live in Time, which premiered tonight at the Toronto International Film Festival, I was struck by how much it owed to generations of films about doomed love stories, but felt like something we haven't really seen in the post-Covid era, at least not with such talented actors. In a deeply cynical era of filmmaking, the two films premiering tonight in one of Toronto's biggest venues were both deeply serious and sentimental, movies where you know you're being manipulated but you go along with it anyway. (The other film is Mike Flanagan's Life of Chuck, which will be covered in a separate article. Spoiler: It's great.) We Live in Time is a film that looks you in the eye and tugs at your heartstrings, a film that would almost certainly fall apart with lesser actors to make this superficial script seem organic. Thankfully, it features Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.

The script is also intentionally muddled. The film opens with a serious cancer diagnosis for Pugh's Almut, who is discussing an impossible choice with her partner Tobias (Garfield): six months of great life, or a year of miserable chemotherapy that might not work anyway. From here, Nick Payne's script jumps back and forth within Tobias and Almut's partnership, essentially unfolding across four timelines. We jump to the days and months after Almut's cancer has returned, when the professional chef decides to enter a cooking competition to achieve one final accomplishment in her life, a decision she keeps secret from Tobias, knowing he doesn't want to put any further strain on her mental or physical state.

“We Live in Time” jumps back to the early days of the relationship between Tobias and Almut, who, we learn, met when she literally hit him with her car. This scene kind of blurs with some scenes where we learn that Almut had cancer once before, forcing the relatively young couple to come to terms with the fact that they might never have children. We know they had children because we also see numerous scenes with a heavily pregnant Almut, leading to one of the most memorable birth scenes in a major motion picture in a long time.

The chronological muddle will be a deal-breaker for some people who like their howl movies straightforward. Crowley and his editor Justine Wright don't use title cards or any markers other than Almut's physical condition, including her pregnant belly and shaved bald head from cancer treatment. The jumps sometimes seem arbitrary, but digging deeper reveals an emotional logic to them, like how you remember key moments in your life as it draws to a close and out of order. I'm not sure the script doesn't have one or two jumps too many, and at times found myself yearning to stay in one chapter of this couple longer than the film allows, but the narrative tactics pose a challenge for the Oscar nominees that probably drew them to the project in the first place. How do you play Day 10 of a relationship differently than Day 100 or Day 1,000?

For fans of Garfield and Pugh, it's a truly worthwhile exercise in acting. The Little Women star has more to do narratively, but to my eyes, it's Garfield who really shines, conveying concern, anger and deep sadness through his remarkably expressive face. They're both truly great, not just in their ability to transcend a script that sometimes feels like it's fighting against their character development, but in how much they can accomplish with such small, nuanced acting choices. It also helps that they have real chemistry, and that Crowley treats their partnership like that between two real adults – the bizarre “no sex in movies” trend on social media will have a new target.

At times, you can almost visually see the buttons being pushed in We Live in Time. There aren't many films that can successfully weave two cancer diagnoses, a birth, a budding romance, and the end of life into one film without feeling like you're playing with the audience's emotions. But I suspect the people this film was made for won't care. There's a reason we keep coming back to this dramatic subgenre: Either out of happiness that we, too, have found the love of our lives, or in the hope that we'll have a meet-cute that fits Almut and Tobias. Maybe without the car crash.

This review was submitted by the Toronto International Film Festival. It opens on October 11^th.