'We Live in Time' tries very hard for feeling (and fails)
A24
No amount of structural wizardry can permit a movie this kind of meet-cute that we’re expected to take seriously: After walking in a robe down the highway to buy pens so he can sign his divorce papers, Tobias (Andrew Garfield) is struck on the way back to his hotel by a vehicle driven by Almut (Florence Pugh), who accompanies him to the hospital and eventually becomes his life partner.
If that made you roll your eyes, glad you’re warmed up: “We Live in Time” is almost entirely built on moments like that, of handling serious injury and divorce and childbirth and cancer, but only enough to depict the movie version, and not in the way that we experience their realities along with the characters.
Where “Blue Valentine” utilized alternating timelines to understand the distance between a honeymoon period and a tailspin and any of the communication challenges or personality conflicts that might connect the periods, “We Live in Time” jumbles its chronology as misdirection from its hollowness. A big issue arrives, the characters have major feelings about it, and usually a fix happens, but there’s no storytelling really. This is life as montage, whether or not there’s actually a montage included, rarely exploring the real challenges of peak moments or the bonding experience of them or the complications we carry with us (like Tobias’ divorce or physical issues following the accident or the time strain that should be a factor as Almut opens and runs her own restaurant). For a moment, writer Nick Payne (“The Last Letter from Your Lover”) seems interested in how to have hard conversations, and there’s power in the acknowledged difficulty to finding the words to discuss treatment, to consider family planning, to share hard and great news.
But director John Crowley (“Brooklyn”) cheats constantly, lunging for emotion with dinner table conversations about marriage proposals, trite sequences of a car boxed in (or a stuck bathroom door) when needing to get to the hospital or give birth, or a lie that seems included only to generate conflict. It’s certainly not because the movie wants to address the couple’s poor communication or how they navigate parenting or balance priorities/career goals/etc. “We Live in Time” only seeks to turn up the volume of the supposed feeling involved without taking the time to get close enough to understand and live anything.
The performances are pretty good and very much not the issue. The issue, broadly, is a film that doesn’t accumulate but merely plateaus, assuming it has captured and delivered something that remains very far off. Watch “We Live in Time” with closed-captioning on and at least a few times you’ll see this on screen: (dreamy music continues). That’s as good as any summary of the narrative approach here.
C
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