Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh’s Winsome Romance Breaks Down in One Ambiguous Scene
DIRECTOR: JOHN CROWLEY/2024
On paper, We Live in Time is exactly the kind of movie I want. A beautiful-looking romance centered on beautiful-looking movie stars? Gimme gimme!
In our early moments with Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and Almut (Florence Pugh), we join them in a doctor’s office. Almut’s cancer has returned, and they are deciding next steps. But first, the audience must return to their past: their meeting, their courtship, and their labored (pun intended) path to parenthood, though not necessarily in that order. For just under two hours—yes, another gimme gimme!—we flit back and forth through the timeline of their romance as their future feels less certain than ever.
We Live in Time is built less on a plot and more on vibes. Growing up on Lost conditioned me to expect more narrative subversion from flashbacks, but this time-hopping is nigh-inconsequential when compared to romances like (500) Days of Summer or About Time. (While I do wonder if that means it was unnecessary as a storytelling device, I can at least give it credit for never confusing its audience thanks to Pugh’s distinct haircuts and eyeliner.) The nonlinear viewing exists instead to create the mood of a memory piece, making the central relationship feel like one long montage a lá to Lorde’s poetry in “Supercut.”
On one level, this makes every moment feel like the best kind of walk on an autumn afternoon: brisk, golden-tinged, and warmer with every step. Garfield and Pugh are the kind of stars with the charisma to keep eyes on them at all times, and every new role they take just leaves us wanting more. (How else can you explain the fervor for Garfield’s Chicken Shop Date episode?) Together they create a collection of winsome moments, funnier and less weepy than you’d expect. On this level, We Live in Time isn’t just watchable—it’s charming. (Somehow this cancer drama didn’t make me cry, which is not something I can say about Garfield’s recent Sesame Street appearance.)
That’s perfect if you’re just looking for a hang with two charismatic people, but the story is less successful on a deeper level. The film I thought of most during this screening was The Way We Were, another character-driven melodrama powered by megawatt stars and sweater-clad montages across eras. We’re still rooting for (or, at the very least, remembering) Katie and Hubbell fifty years later not just for Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford’s electric chemistry or even for the theme song; what made their story spicy were the characters’ ideological differences. The pair represented love overcoming cultural backgrounds, politics, and careers, and when they fought for their romance, they necessarily sacrificed somewhere else. In between, they broke audiences’ hearts fighting with each other.
Look, we’re not monsters here—we’re all going to root for a young family to overcome a cancer diagnosis. But aside from that struggle, which our heroes have little control over, the stakes are unclear. Tobias wants a family, and Almut prioritizes her career, though neither clarify their deepest motivations for these desires well. In one key scene, Tobias writes Almut a letter he is too choked up to read aloud. After she reads it, she agrees to the offer in his letter, realigning their relationship after a disagreement. What are the contents of that letter? Your guess is as good as mine. Whatever they agree to becomes the crux of their future, but because we’re not privy to their contract, we can never hold them accountable to it. When she chooses a work trip over a family event and he can’t fathom her choice, who has violated the covenant? Both behave insensitively, but as a cancer patient and caregiving spouse raising a young daughter, we can’t help but sympathize with both of them, too. We Live in Time pulls its punches, so afraid to villainize either character it can’t acknowledge their flaws, undercutting the impact of their growth.