“WE LIVE IN TIME” - REVIEW
WE LIVE IN TIME is designed to make you cry.
This is not a criticism. After all, isn’t this the ultimate job of movies? To move you? To whisk you away from your problems for a couple of hours and make you feel deeply for the love, the dreams, the goals, and the challenges of the people on screen? The latest from director John Crowley (BROOKLYN) wears its heart right on its sleeve, and I promise you: unless you are made of stone, those extra movie theater napkins will come in handy.
A curious acquisition for A24, WE LIVE IN TIME is a big-hearted, unabashedly romantic, sexy, and mature tearjerker for adults, and the best one in years. The film, apart from its nonlinear structure, feels like a 90s throwback. It’s totally a movie my high school girlfriend and I would have watched together (and then made out afterwards), but unlike those 90s movies, the beginning/foundation of the central couple’s relationship is one that most romances on film don’t focus on: respect. Mutual respect.
Perhaps that makes the movie sound too polite, but it is the key to believing everything that the characters go through, and their ability to get through it together—and it’s a lot. Without giving much away, Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and Almut (Florence Pugh) meet during big turning points in their lives: Tobias is going through a divorce, and Almut is opening a restaurant. If only that were it. They also meet-cute when she quite accidentally hits him with a car. While Tobias recovers, they get to know one another, and when he finally graces her restaurant… that’s when the sparks fly.
We get the ups and downs of their relationship: we get passion, we get discussions about starting a family, we get career opportunities, we get childbirth (during one dynamite sequence that, apart from the location, reminded me of the birth of our own children), we get secrets and painful resentments… and we also get illness. And in that, we get to see what a relationship is capable of when push comes to shove. What we don’t get are the events in this order.
Presented non-linearly, the actors and the filmmakers deftly work their magic, and even though we may not always immediately understand where we are in their relationship timeline, the emotional resonance is such that we have no trouble following it and, more importantly, feeling it.
Garfield reunites with director Crowley for the first time since 2007’s drama BOY A, and reminds us of why he is one of our finest actors. Tobias is the quieter, steadier of the two, and the warmth and intelligence and good humor with which Garfield channels his gentle gifts of subtlety here are so plentiful, especially in moments when he needs to decide when he’s going to support Almut in her ultimate journey, and when to speak up and advocate for his own feelings and for the best interests of their family unit. Pugh continues to bring her comfortable, unfussy acting style, and makes the leap from a terrific actor to an official movie star. In the bigger role and in what could have been a manic-pixie-dream-girl-with-an-exciting-career type role, Pugh perfectly calibrates Almut as someone who is strong, opinionated, and confident enough to makes her needs known, while also learning about humility and mutuality and respect on her journey with Tobias as they truly become the caretakers of one another’s hearts.
The time-jumping script, which also manages to be sex-positive and feminist without being a movie about quote-unquote feminism, lives cozily in between the best work of Richard Curtis and Nicholas Sparks, and under the thoughtful direction of Crowley, the film remains earnest without giving into full-blown sentimentality (well, almost). While WE LIVE IN TIME still takes place in a movie world, where everyone is beautiful and no one seems to ever work that much but still have fabulous houses and apartments, it is the raw, earthy quality of Pugh that keeps it from feeling cloying and manipulative (well, almost), and the measured quality of Garfield that keeps them on solid ground. The actors’ chemistry crackles, and we believe in their connection from the moment they meet all the way through their time together.
Sometime after the movie ended, I found myself slipping back into my baseline cynical lizard brain, thinking about some of the events that made me cry, as well as how loaded with events the film seemed. One might argue that there were too many events and how some of them felt engineered and shoehorned into a pretty full narrative… but life is often like that, too, and the movie of our own memory would be like that as well. We go through stretches where if you were to look back, you would say, “how did we get all of that done during that time? How did we get anything done during that time?“ And hopefully, if you’re living your life well and you have a partner that makes you feel like your time is well-spent, it’s not the thinking about it but how you feel about it that ultimately matters, and when it’s done this well, those tears are earned, and welcome.
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Zach is a proud member of the Minnesota Film Critics Alliance (MNFCA). For more info about Zach, the organization, or to read other great reviews from other great Minnesota-based film critics, click here: https://mnfilmcriticalliance.wordpress.com/