Writer: Nick Payne
Director: John Crowley
With huge star names, Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield as its co-leads, it is surprising that Nick Payne and John Crowley’s new romantic drama, We Live in Time, is so unremarkable. Chosen as the Mayor of London’s Gala at the BFI London Film Festival 2024, the film cuts back and forth in time showing different stages of their relationship, and although the central couple have chemistry, the film takes the audience to places we’ve been before in its exploration of love, aspiration, family and loss. This contemporary story is nicely played out but becomes a vehicle for the emotional range of its actors than an experience for its audience.
Almut and Tobias meet when she literally runs him over when he stops to retrieve the pen he needs to sign his divorce papers. Over several years, the audience see their first and subsequent dates, meeting the family, decisions about children and the strains of becoming and sustaining a family when Almut receives a devastating diagnosis.
We Live in Time enjoys its choppy structure, making the movement around the timeline of Almut and Tobias’ relationship the main substance of the drama, creating a sense of foreboding about the big future that lies before them and equally the past love that they have shared. Payne as writer makes that a complex picture filled with conflicting decisions such as whether to have children, early arguments and later difficulties when Almut wants to prioritise her career and the memory of achievement over her health, so the relationship feels convincing and there is plenty of chemistry between Pugh and Garfield that builds investment about what might happen to them.
Crowley and Payne are more interested in the small memories and moments that define the connection between a couple and an extended sequence in a petrol station as Almut gives birth reflects the care they have one another as well as the building blocks of a life created together. But the film continually leans into the sentimental and while it may pay lip service to Almut’s career as a competition winning chef, Tobias’ job at Weetabix is a moment of brand placement but he’s never seen actually doing anything other than filming a corporate video which slightly dislocates them from the real world in ways that romcoms tend to.
Pugh is an easy presence on screen always, comfortable with whoever she is playing and Almut is hugely likeable, cool and devoted to Tobias, the kind of woman that men like to write but it is frustrating that sex require her nudity to be visible but not Garfield’s – have we not got passed this yet. Garfield is a sensitive Tobias, eyes big with tears at multiple points in the movie, clearly bewildered by how his character could have be so lucky. These are both lovely, well-pitched performances that illuminate their characters’ every emotion, but both actors have far greater complexity on their CV than they are given here.
We Live in Time is a perfectly nice film about perfectly nice people and it’s 100-minutes flies by fairly quickly. But with any other actors it probably wouldn’t be receiving a gala screening at a major festival.
We Live in Time is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
