We Live in Time is the kind of fan that really sets itself apart from a lot of what is out there this time of year. While Spooky Season does what it does and the studios are shoving their awards fodder into our faces, director John Crowley (Brooklyn) and writer Nick Payne (episodes of Wanderlust and The Crown) bring a film that could have easily fallen into that second category but instead gently eases their way to it almost unintentionally.
Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield star here in a tale that chronicles their relationship from an extreme of a chance meeting to the trials and tribulations of falling in love and staying there. Garfield (who previously worked with Crowley on A Boy) plays Tobias, a divorcee whose life becomes entagled with Pugh’s Almut, a chef and restaurant owner in a story that is fully engaging and emotional. Taking place over a decade of their lives, this film does time-jumping in a way that most others cannot: keeping the story moving without having to do a lot of figuring out where we are at any given moment and not doing so with the use of on-screen prompts. No matter where the story is at in any given moment.
There are layers to this story that I don’t really want to get into as they do impact the emotional punch that enhances this story, but I am sure they are out there if you choose to seek them out. Even thusly, this story has no real punch without outstanding performances from its lead actors, and We Live in Time delivers on every level. Pugh and Garfield have outstanding chemistry with each other while conveying the struggles of their own characters in a way that can only be described as palpable. I was right there with them every step of the way on this journey with performances that just felt natural, and this is important because neither of them felt like they were fishing for awards here; it honestly feels like they wanted to tell a great story and have every scene having them simply in the moment. It is performances like these that make me notice when I offer up my personal nominations at the end of each year versus the “usual suspects” that tend to be on the lips of the masses each January. The secondary characters do stay in their lane in a way that also feels natural (especially during a sequence at a gas station that had me laughing out loud multiple times), reminding me that there was a world around them; another quality that a lot of films like this one tend to lack by putting too much focus on the main characters and treating the “fringe” characters as what can only be defined as fodder.
While this may not be the “feel good” film of 2024, We Live in Time is one that did leave me with the warm and fuzzies that it is intended to give me. In the short video intro that Garfield and Pugh did before our screening, Garfield described the film as a story of “loving and being loved”. I cannot use a better description myself.
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