The weepy romantic drama had an explosion 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 effective “We Live in Time,” which premiered tonight at the Toronto International Film Festival, I was struck by how it clearly owes a great debt to generations of films about doomed romance but how it felt like something we haven’t really seen in the post-Covid era, at least not with actors this talented. In a deeply cynical era of filmmaking, the two films that premiered tonight at one of Toronto’s biggest venues were both deeply earnest and sentimental, movies in which one knows they’re being manipulated but goes for the ride anyway. (Mike Flanagan’s “The Life of Chuck” is the other one, and that will be highlighted in a separate piece. Spoiler: It’s great.) “We Live in Time” is a film that looks you in the eyes as it tugs on your heartstrings, a movie that would almost certainly fall apart with lesser performers to make this kind of shallow script feel organic. Luckily, this one has Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.
It also has a very purposefully jumbled script. The film opens with a severe cancer diagnosis for Pugh’s Almut, who speaks to her partner Tobias (Garfield) about an impossible decision: six months of great life vs a year of miserable chemo that might not work anyway. From here, Nick Payne’s script jumps around in the partnership of Tobias & Almut, basically unfolding on four timelines. We jump to the days and months after Almut’s cancer has returned, in which the professional chef decides to join a cooking competition for one last accomplishment in her life, a decision she hides from Tobias, knowing he wouldn’t want further stress on her mental or physical state.
“We Live in Time” jumps back to the early days of the courtship of Tobias & Almut, who we discover met when she literally hit him with her car. This one kind of blurs with a few scenes in which we learn that Almut had cancer once already, which forced the relatively young couple to reconcile with the fact that they may never have children. We know they did because we also see numerous scenes of a very pregnant Almut, leading up to one of the more memorable birth scenes in a major film in a long time.
The chronological jumble will be a dealbreaker for some people who like their weepers straightforward. Crowley and his editor Justine Wright don’t use title cards or other markers beyond Almut’s physical state, including the pregnant belly and the shaved head of cancer treatment. The jumps feel random at times but digging deeper reveals an emotional logic to them, the way one would remember key moments of their life out of order as it’s coming to an end. I’m not sure the script doesn’t have one or two jumps too many and sometimes longed to spend time in one chapter of this couple for longer than the film allows, but the narrative gamesmanship provides a challenge for the Oscar nominees that likely attracted them to the project in the first place. How do you play day 10 of a relationship different from day 100 or day 1000?
It makes for a truly rewarding acting exercise for fans of Garfield and Pugh. The “Little Women” star has to do more heavy lifting in terms of narrative, but it’s Garfield who really shines in my eyes, conveying concern, anger, and deep sadness through that remarkably expressive face of his. They’re both truly great, not just in their ability to overcome a script that sometimes feels like it’s fighting against their character development but in how much they can do with such small, nuanced acting choices. It helps that they have legit chemistry too, and that Crowley treats their partnership like one between two actual adults—the bizarre trend of “No Sex in Movies” on social media will have a new target.
There are times when one can almost visually see the buttons being pushed in “We Live in Time.” It’s not many films that can successfully weave two cancer diagnoses, a birth, a budding romance, and end of life into one film and NOT feel like it’s playing with the emotions of the audience. But I suspect that the people for whom this movie was made won’t care. There’s a reason we keep coming back to this dramatic subgenre, either lucky that we too have found the love of our lives or hoping that we’ll have a meet-cute to match Almut and Tobias. Maybe without the car accident.
This review was filed from the Toronto International Film Festival. It opens on October 11th.
