The weepy romantic drama had a boom in the wake of “The Notebook,” but died out with the numerous adaptations of other Nicholas Sparks books and their 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 huge debt to generations of films about doomed romances, but how it felt like something we haven’t really seen in the post-Covid era — at least not with such talented casts. In a deeply cynical cinematic era, the two films that premiered tonight on one of Toronto’s biggest stages were deeply heartfelt and sentimental, movies where you know you’re being manipulated but go with the flow anyway. (The other is Mike Flanagan’s “The Life of Chuck,” which will be highlighted in a separate article. Spoiler: It’s great.) “We Live in Time” is a movie that looks you in the eye and touches your heart, a movie that would almost certainly fall apart with lesser actors to make this kind of shallow script seem organic. Luckily, this one has Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.
It also has a deliberately messy script. The film opens with a severe cancer diagnosis for Almut (Pugh), who talks to her partner Tobias (Garfield) about an impossible choice: six months of a wonderful life versus a year of miserable chemotherapy that might not work anyway. From here, Nick Payne’s script jumps back and forth in Tobias and Almut’s relationship, basically playing out across four timelines. We jump to the days and months after Almut’s cancer recurs, in which the professional chef decides to enter a cooking competition to achieve one last milestone in her life — a decision she keeps from Tobias, knowing that he wouldn’t want any more stress on her mental or physical state.
“We Live in Time” flashes back to the early days of Tobias and Almut’s courtship, who we learn met when she literally ran him over with her car. This scene is blurred a bit by a few scenes where we learn that Almut already had cancer once, forcing the relatively young couple to come to terms with the fact that they might never have children. We know they did because we also see numerous scenes of a very pregnant Almut, leading up to one of the most memorable birth scenes in a major movie in a long time.
The chronological disarray will be a deal breaker for some people who like the couple’s stories more straightforward. Crowley and his editor Justine Wright don’t use titles or other markers beyond Almut’s physical state, including her baby bump and shaved head from cancer treatment. The jumps seem random at times, but digging deeper reveals an emotional logic to them, like the way one would remember key moments in their life out of order when it’s coming to an end. I’m not sure the script doesn’t have one or two jumps too many, and at times I longed to spend time on one chapter of this couple for longer than the film allows, but the narrative game poses a challenge for the Oscar nominees that probably drew them to the project in the first place. How do you play day 10 of a relationship differently than day 100 or day 1,000?
It’s a truly rewarding acting exercise for fans of Garfield and Pugh. The “Little Women” star has to do more of the heavy lifting in terms of narrative, but it’s Garfield who really shines in my eyes, conveying worry, anger and deep sadness through that remarkably expressive face of his. They’re both genuinely great, not just in their ability to overcome a script that sometimes feels like it’s fighting against their characters’ development, but in how much they can do with such small, nuanced acting decisions. It helps that they also have legitimate chemistry, and that Crowley treats their relationship like it’s between two actual adults — the bizarre “There’s no sex in movies” trend on social media is going to get a new target.
There are moments when you can almost visually see the buttons being pushed in “We Live in Time.” There aren’t many movies that can successfully combine two cancer diagnoses, a birth, a budding romance, and the end of a life into one film without it feeling like it’s playing with the audience’s emotions. But I suspect the people this movie was made for won’t mind. There’s a reason we keep coming back to this dramatic subgenre, whether it’s out of luck that we’ve also found the love of our life or out of hope for a meet-cute on par with Almut and Tobias. Maybe without the car crash.
This review was presented at the Toronto International Film Festival. It premieres on October 11.He.