‘We Live In Time’ Review: Great Moments Don’t Add Up a Great Film

Time is cracked open gracefully then gently whipped in director John Crowley’s wannabe weeper We Live in Time—much in the manner that the lead character Almut, a top-ranked chef played by Florence Pugh, handles eggs.

WE LIVE IN TIME ★★1/2 (2.5/4 stars) Directed by: John Crowley Written by: Nick Payne Starring: Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh, Lee Braithwaite, Douglas Hodge Running time: 107 mins.

At the start of the film, we see her pluck a few from the hens in the coop outside her rustic cottage to make a morning soufflé. Later in the movie, but much earlier in the world of the film, she buys them at the supermarket by the half dozen to make an omelet in her London apartment in hopes of impressing Andrew Garfield’s Tobias, a divorcee she started dating after a meet-not-so-cute. (She runs him over with her Mini Cooper). Her gastronomic seduction works.

But is Crowley’s soft scramble of a romantic drama—the Brooklyn director’s attempt to escape movie jail after The Goldfinch’s box office and critical drubbing—equally successful?

Yes, but only in individual bites, not as a whole meal. 

By crisscrossing time frames, Crowley, working from a script by playwright Nick Payne, halts his film’s momentum and lessens the overall impact of the central romance. It doesn’t help matters that by the end of all that time travel, we arrive at a denouement that belongs in another film entirely. 

Yet the unusual format also allows Crowley to deliver untethered moments of such startling and rarely glimpsed intimacy, brought to emotional life by the astoundingly expressive faces of the two leads, that you almost don’t care that the movie containing them doesn’t entirely hang together. 

We see Almut and Tobias in a bathtub eating chocolate biscuits off her pregnant belly, an instance of sublime tranquility after the couple’s harrowing struggles to conceive, in part because she had to remove a cancerous ovary. (It is one of three scenes where we get to witness Garfield fold his lanky frame into a tub, and each is better than the next.)

We linger in the soft light of their garden as Tobias and their daughter Ella (Grace Delaney)  cut Almut’s hair, anticipating—when her cancer reoccurs—that the chemotherapy will cause her to lose it once again.

And we share a nervous and heartbroken smile as they find nourishment in chocolates procured from a kind oncologist (Irish actor Niamh Cusack) who does not have good news to share.

The film delivers reasonably well on the big moments too—when the couple gets stuck in traffic on the way to hospital, Almut must deliver their baby in a gas station bathroom—but it is in the subtleties  where the movie sparks to life, reminding you that one of the great pleasures of movie going is seeing impossibly attractive and emotionally adroit people simply experiencing life as it happens.

Here we have the engagingly vulnerable Garfield, re-teaming with the director who first introduced the world to the British-American actor with 2007’s Boy A. The erstwhile Spider-Man seems to spend the entire movie with tears standing at the precipice of his eyelid, like kids on the high dive afraid to jump. (Speaking of crying, at the screening I went to, they handed out packs of tissues branded A24, the film’s distributor, a move that called to mind the barf bags that John Waters used to distribute before showing Pink Flamingos; for the record, mine went unopened.)

Then there is Pugh, whose broad face and spark-plug demeanor are reminiscent of a more athletic version of the noir gamine Gloria Grahame. (Pugh’s character used to be a competitive figure skater and you believe it.) She is a cinematic alley cat, at one moment looking to cuddle and at the next clawing your eyes out. 

Garfield and Pugh are terrific together and the film falters in most instances when they are not sharing the same frame.     

These include the time that Almut spends in a cooking competition when she should be focused on her health. It is a decision that puts Tobias in a difficult position—she initially hides it from him—and does no better for us as an audience. A movie that has brought to the fore moments so intimate that they are rarely or ever seen by those not participating in them, has no business staging its emotional conclusion on the set of a cooking TV show that looks like a second rate Beat Bobby Flay.