It’s all just a matter of expectations. Early word on John Crowley’s We Live In Time was gushing – here was a tragic romcom that will leave you drenched in tears while containing scorching sexual chemistry between its leads Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, which does sound like an irresistible recipe for any cinemagoer. Now it’s here, though, and it’s just, well, an ok British romcom. Maybe that’s all it ever needed to be, but I have to say that, after the hype, this felt like an underpowered outing from Crowley (a far cry from his brilliant Brooklyn), very sweet and nicely performed but never really anything more.
Pugh and Garfield play oddly named couple Almut and Tobias, her a top chef and him a digital brand manager for Weetabix (one of many real-brand name drops in the film that, instead of feeling like product placement, do genuinely ground the story in our specific world). We meet them initially as a rock-solid couple, with a three year old kid, who have just been badly shaken by a returning diagnosis of ovarian cancer for Almut – a second bout of illness that now may well be terminal. From here, we pinball back and forth in time, catching moments from the pair’s meet-cute (she runs him over while he’s in the midst of filing a divorce), their early courtship, the first cancer diagnosis, and the pregnancy and birth of their daughter.
It’s a fractured timeline that, ultimately, does the story no favours, sapping drama in the past (say, their early-relationship arguments about whether or not they want kids) and present, where we haven’t quite got to grips with the ins and outs of this relationship. Pugh and Garfield are very fun and charismatic guides through this plot, though, even if their romantic chemistry is rather more lacking than the initial response suggested – the film also tries to posit them as being roughly the same age, which rings very false.
What was also not suggested was just how goofy We Live In Time is, its comedy frequently very broad in a way I was not expecting but was mostly pleasantly surprised by. It keeps things zipping along and perhaps the film’s strongest suit is its slick pacing, the time spent here slips by very smoothly. It does mean, though, that when the cancer stuff really starts kicking in, it didn’t hit me anywhere near as hard as it should have, Crowley and writer Nick Payne struggling to shift the tonal gears to get somewhere truly devastating.
Even with the occasional explicit sex scene, We Live In Time is aimed purely at mass appeal, holding back from going anywhere too raw for its audience, and this extends to a rather antiseptic style – it’s all shot, scored, and soundtracked a bit too much like one of those ‘emotional’ Christmas adverts that Brits get all excited about every year. A real box-office focus is not inherently a bad thing, especially for a romcom (a genre still in need of a couple more revitalising shots to get back to being a regular big screen fixture), but here it does feel like a limitation, kid gloves put on for a story that required boxing mitts.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 