Directed by John Crowley | Written by Nick Payne | 107 min | ▲▲▲▲▲ | VOD
A capsule review of this film appeared on FITI in September during #TIFF24
If anyone read or saw my coverage of this film at the Toronto International Film Festival you’ll know it floored me. It’s of a genre that doesn’t thrill me — the cancer weepie — but then it proceeded to undermine many of those kinds of tropes, largely thanks to a clever way with non-linear chronology, which juxtaposes moments of pain with (many) moments of joy and humour and avoiding the most maudlin notes.
We Live In Time is from Irish-born John Crowley (Brooklyn), and doesn’t escape the sentiment, especially in the early going. Florence Pugh is a successful chef and restaurateur with an odd name, Almut, and Andrew Garfield is the more reserved and bookish Tobias who is an office drone working at Weetabix — which, it turns out, is a single joke that goes nowhere.
They have a ridiculous meet-cute — she actually hits him with her Mini while he’s out purchasing pens so he can sign his divorce papers. This while the score by The National’s Bryce Dessner is both tasteful and manipulative. The British middlebrowness of it all is practically obscene.
The first act is pure romcom — not that there’s anything wrong with that, especially with stars as winning as these two at the mutual peak of their powers — but as we bounce back and forth in time the degrees of schmaltz begin to diminish. The shifting juxtapositions of illness, relationship complications, the decision-making around having a family, then parenthood, wind up delivering a genuine tapestry of emotion. The storytelling is so confident and the performers so convincing it deked past all my critical faculties.
It also does something incredibly deftly, and that’s to shift the central focus from the couple to her — he’s a lot less interesting than she is, anyway. It makes her journey entirely empowering rather than bleakly tragic. It asks the audience, if you knew your days on the planet were suddenly, seriously limited, how would you choose to live them? Would you take medication to prolong your days, but be passive, or shorten them while doing something proactive?
It also features a classic birth scene in a gas station bathroom, which is what audiences will be talking about coming out of cinemas — not so much the meme about the carousel horse, which we’ll leave to disposable internet distractions. What’s to be celebrated are the directorial, script, and editing choices in the final few scenes, which completely undercut what these films usually do.
Someone looking for movies that wallow in the minutiae of deathbed drama can watch The Fault In Our Stars, Love Story, Terms Of Endearment, or August In New York. This film takes a far more creative and interesting approach, though it’s no less devastating. More so, I’d argue, for its grace. And what it leaves to the imagination.
Garfield underplays all of this nicely — he mostly needs to be compassionate, understanding, and to badly hide his hurt, but it’s Pugh who once again proves she’s got the star wattage to power your average-sized city, reminding me of the likes of Julie Christie, Glenda Jackson, and Kate Winslet. This is easily amongst the year’s best films — it will take a harder heart than mine to resist its charms.
