Directed by John Crawley. Written by Nick Payne
There’s a metric in baseball called Wins Above Replacement (WAR) that crunches a bunch of numbers and factors in a given player’s defensive and offensive ability to determine how many more games a team can expect to win by fielding that player over a replacement-level alternative. It’s easy to say a player wins you ballgames, but the statheads, in theory, found a way to prove it.
Filmmaking isn’t baseball and art isn’t sports, but the eye-test is enough to determine that Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield take John Crawley’s We Live In Time from bad to so-so. They’re not miracle workers, but imagining the movie without its two leads, who carry the day as individuals and a duo, makes it clear the cinematic WAR of Pugh and Garfield is undeniable.
They star as Almut and Tobias, and writer Nick Payne’s script leaps back and forth in time as we watch these two lovers navigate courtship, the question of children, having children, child rearing, and, most painfully, Almut’s two cancer diagnoses.
Almut is driven, headstrong, a successful restaurateur, a former figure skating prodigy, and has many friends and admirers. As for Tobias: he works in IT for Weetabix, his only friend is his dad, and his passion in life is being in love with Almut. It’s easy to see why Tobias would feel that way about Al, but his own romantic appeal is vested entirely in Garfield’s fuzzy charm. Crawley’s film is plagued by this imbalance from the offset.
Children and potentially terminal illnesses are just about as life-changing as things get, so there’s a lot of fraught material for Crawley to get into, but the lopsided character development hobbles any romantic prospects, so it’s more accurate to label We Live In Time a dramedy rather than the romcom it purports to be.
Sometimes it seems to skirt romance altogether. One scene sees Tobias attempt to put into words what Almut means to him, but he stumbles repeatedly, so Almut just ends up reading what he wrote, and not out loud, so we have to make do with her facial expression telling us that it was indeed heartfelt and romantic. Take my word for it, Crowley seems to say, but I’m afraid I won’t.
The nonlinear narrative is meant to take us from cute highs to devastating lows, shifting from honeymoon period bliss to austere doctor’s offices, but instead of maximizing impact through contrast, the decision only weakens these moments. Some scenes are funny, some of them are sad, We Live In Time have several standout scenes, including an unforgettable birth sequence, but everything powerful is made less so by how Crowley jumps back and forth, and his decision to cease doing it when the movie enters crunchtime suggests he knows it as well.
This equivalent of cinematic fear of commitment is a shame, and you wonder whether there wouldn’t be both power and delight in keeping it linear. Call me old-fashioned.
I haven’t gotten to celebrate Pugh and Garfield’s performance yet, because like this review, their work is buried under what works against them. It’s therefore all the more striking that despite the subpar writing, debilitating creative decisions and pacing, there’s still true chemistry to trace in their performances. They both have the juice: Pugh with her force of nature presence and intensity and Garfield whose work as Tobias is like a hug, present, warm, and sincere.
For its comedic bits, We Live In Time also goes to Garfield, and rightly so, his sense of timing, witty delivery and intuition make for a toolkit most would kill to have. Given way less to work with, Garfield produces a whole meal with pantry scraps.
We Live In Time is certainly lucky to have both its leads, because without them, it’d be a wholly unremarkable film about devotion in the context of love and self that only gleams in certain moments, but mostly flirts with the cliché and uninspired.
Mikkel Frederiksen 