There’s a gorgeous tenderness through the best scenes of We Live in Time. A warm and impassioned ambience matched by sweet performances articulating strong and very difficult emotions in resonating ways -everything that makes movie romance so attractive, and this in both broad and subtle aspects. In microcosm, the signs of a movie that ought to pluck at your heartstrings in all the right ways, not least factoring in as well its extremely sympathetic subject matter. And yet, the movie beyond such touchstones is mild and underwhelming -not so effective on the whole as its singular spaces of real power.
This latest film from Brooklyn director John Crowley promises a lot of the sentiments and structural devices I gravitate to most in a romance film. A relationship spanning a great length of time, touching on the emotional highs and lows from first meeting to maturity. A pair of attractive, talented, and charismatic lead actors capable of working off each other in natural ways. And an element of scope not just in time but in theme, endeavouring to say something deeply personal or rich about the nature of relationships, the power of love, the human capacity for it. Several of these are indeed features of the film, but to a less ambitious degree than let on by marketing. Likewise the central narrative point is more pronounced.
The film employs a non-linear structure, which works at setting up the severity of the stakes early, but soon becomes an ill-fitting, more confounding device. Thus we meet Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) several years and a young child into their relationship, as she battles terminal ovarian cancer and they reckon with what little time they have left together. That time began when Almut, an esteemed Bavarian chef, hit Tobias, a Weetabix advertising representative, with her car. Despite this, and in the light of his own separation and eventual divorce from his wife, the pair strike up an immediate and passionate romance. In fragments, the film presents their life over the course of the next few years through her early cancer scare, her pregnancy and the birth of their daughter, up to the present where she attempts to partake as the British representative in the Bocuse d'Or all while the cancer exacerbates.
Several plot points here, including the cancer not least of all, seem almost engineered to be acting showcases for the stars. And indeed, what spark there is to the movie comes largely from Garfield and Pugh, though Pugh especially. A gamut of emotions are on display across this movie -and Pugh gets the most difficult ones in the extremes of her illness-induced anger and depression, and especially a highly challenging and intense childbirth scene. She was put through the ringer on this movie, though not I detect in a manner akin to Don't Worry Darling; on the contrary she appears to relish this challenge and relates a very warm and honest chemistry with Garfield. For his part, he's at his most charming and affable. And the pair together do enough of a good job, especially through the most moving (daresay saccharine scenes) that it modestly distracts from the thinness of their roles.
Tobias suffers more for this, as the movie gradually goes from centring the relationship equitably to honing in on Almut decidedly more prominently, to the point Tobias's life and outside relationships disappear after a while. We don't even get much a sense of his career after the early days of his affair with Almut, where she was showing him off to friends as the 'Weetabix Man' (I appreciate how Crowley makes no effort whatsoever to placate his non-UK audience). But he’s mostly a doting boyfriend in the latter parts of the movie, his own agency subtle, if present at all. However Almut, who was a teen skating champion before the traumatic death of her father saw her give it up forever -in spite of a more detailed backstory and greater attention feels a bit shallow at times too, often only getting by on Pugh’s own charisma.
And this comes largely out of the banality of the story she is given, which does feel more than a little patronising. Countless times we’ve seen the narrative of the wife and mother dying tragically young, for their spirit to live on in the husband and child. And the way it is handled here slides neatly in to the basic tropes, not just in characterisation but the film’s whole sappy execution of it, with big overwhelming music beats, dreary montage, and even a last scene of playfulness before the inevitable. I like bittersweet love stories, but this feels just too calculated -especially with a discomforting non-linear structure that doesn’t much contribute anything, and the motivation of personal pride the script unconvincingly disguises as virtuousness as explanation for Almut’s rather reckless attitude and skewed priorities through her last months. It comes off as a moral statement that feels false, that elevates the feelings and sustained well-being of those around her, particularly her daughter, over her own.
These frustrating decisions and themes undermine those parts of the movie that have genuine life to them, that feel like beautiful touchstones in the evolution of a romantic relationship over time, or just luxuriate in the actors' chemistry or some charming beats of comedy. Indeed, the movie may have been more effective had it embraced a more rom-com orientation, as both Pugh and Garfield are capable of being quite funny and sexy together. Some nice, wholesome moments are contributed by side characters as well, like Almut's protégé Jade (Lee Braithwaite), a pair of convenience store workers Sanjay (Nikhil Parmar) and Jane (Kerry Godliman) who help deliver her baby in an emergency, and Tobias's sweet father Reginald (Douglas Hodge), whose own related love story at the mid-point is one of the most unexpectedly touching beats in the film.
But scattered bright spots are still just spots. The title of this movie is designed to evoke the limited time that Almut has left -We Live in the Time we have left together. But in light of her second fateful diagnosis, making the most of that time is not what we see Almut and Tobias doing, much as their happy if challenging life together is seen in spurts beforehand. Rarely is there a sense of urgency felt, as the movie by its style spends most of its time situated in eulogy mode, remarking back on their love together in the knowledge of its tragic end. Its grace is in those performances that bring power to several scenes of solemnity and romance. They are degraded by context though, making what is meant to be a lovely sad story into a largely dismal sad story.
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