Everyone likes their romantic movies, whether they want to admit it or not. It’s just that certain audiences need a veneer of narrative sophistication in such movies, so they don’t have to feel superior to them. It’s not enough just to have a meet cute between strangers and watch a series of charming events play out between them, culminating in a happy ending, or at least some version of a happy ending, after some necessary obstacles are overcome. These more demanding audiences want to see their romances through a high-concept lens, maybe involving time travel, or at least a shuffled storyline.

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In its title alone, We Live in Time suggests it might deliver on both of those things, but it only delivers on one of them, and even that one is lacking in narrative justification. There is no time travel theme – look elsewhere, fans of the Rachel McAdams movies The Time Traveler’s Wife and About Time – though the movie’s title certainly plays off the notion that there might be in trying to ensnare its desired audience.

We Live in Time does present its scenes out of sequence. The breaks between them are rarely indicated through any sort of technique, resulting in occasional disorientation. The ultimately disorienting element of the movie, though, is that it seems to have no purpose for this storytelling choice, leaving the cynical among us wondering if it was all just a big bait-and-switch to begin with.

Fortunately, John Crowley’s film does star a pair of extremely compelling actors. Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh play Tobias and Almut, who have quite the meet cute indeed – she hits him with her car while he’s stooping to pick something up, amidst the bathrobe-wearing depression of just signing his divorce papers. They’re undergoing quite the unique scenario, in that she’s very pregnant while also facing a very advanced stage of ovarian cancer. But wait a minute, here is the central device kicking in. The pregnancy and the cancer are at two different points of their relationship, presented consecutively on screen, and we’re going to get a lot of other snippets of their life together sprinkled in as Crowley and writer Nick Payne see fit.

Almut used to be a figure skater, but her current professional passion, which has taken her very far in that chosen line of work, is as a high-end chef capable of beautiful delicacies. (Tobias is also in food, of a sort – he’s an advertising executive for Weetabix.) Almut gets invited to participate in a prestigious cooking competition, which will require every bit of her strength and concentration, as well as that of her sous-chef, Jade (Lee Braithwaite). However, she has to keep it a secret from Tobias because she’s supposed to be focusing on her treatment for cancer (and their wedding, which has never happened previously despite them having a young daughter). She’d rather leave behind a legacy of professional success than months of weakening under the treatment with no certainty that it will save her life.

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There’s a lot of useful material in We Live in Time, about the choices we make in the hopes of leaving our mark after we’re gone. It’s a debate any patient with a potentially terminal diagnosis must have with themselves. Would you rather live “six to eight great months,” as Almut characterises it to Tobias, if you know that will be the full remainder of your life, or would you rather fight through that period while vomiting and losing your hair, when you know the chances of it saving you are slim?

This useful material, though, doesn’t elevate the film as a prestige object, which its handsome construction and excellent casting have promised us. Payne’s script does the work to shuffle the scenes so that they do convey a different portrait of these characters than if their story had just been told chronologically, but there’s a troubling lack of relevance to this choice. In a situation like this, that choice needs to speak to the themes themselves, but it does not in We Live in Time. Unless we are just viewing these scenes as an accumulation of the recollections of any relationship, told in whatever sequence our memory happens to produce to us. We want the narrative sequencing to be intrinsic to what this movie is about, but it’s extrinsic at best.

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Purely as an acting showcase, though, it works well. This critic cannot stop singing the praises of Florence Pugh, who really can do no wrong; We Live in Time is about as much she ever misses, and it’s still pretty good. Garfield has been a bit more stealth in his journey to acclaim, having had his Spider-Man days and now looking for work that’s more meaningful. Both actors get to use their natural British accents, which feels like a novelty in and of itself after so many turns playing Americans.

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As a director, John Crowley has quite an effective romance already on his resume, which is the 2015 film Brooklyn, in which Saoirse Ronan also got to use her native Irish accent. He had the acting pedigree there as well to bring big results, only the script didn’t need to pretend to be something it wasn’t to draw us in to a simple story of an Irish immigrant feeling through her world and young love. If you strip away the narrative conceit of We Live in Time, it’s a fairly ordinary story of people making life choices under the spectre of disease. Which doesn’t make it a bad movie, it just makes it an unremarkable one.

 

We Live in Time opens in cinemas on Thursday.

6 / 10