For a film about cancer ravaging a young family, We Live in Time is surprisingly soothing: chicken soup blended to a warm pap and spooned into the mouth. Directed by John Cowley – who made the equally palatable Brooklyn – it stars Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh as Tobias and Almut, a couple whose prospects are dashed when Almut discovers she has ovarian cancer.
The film is their love story told modishly out of sequence, so that we see Almut’s cancer returning after a period of remission before learning how Tobias and Almut first met. But fitfully, a timeline emerges. Tobias, who has a suspiciously undemanding data job at Weetabix, is staying in a hotel as he divorces his first wife when he goes on an improbable jaunt down a dual carriageway in his hotel dressing gown and is hit by a car.
The driver is Almut, a bisexual figure skater turned award-winning chef (naturally) who has one of those spunky, feisty personalities mercifully preserved for women in romantic dramas like this one. She waits for her victim to regain consciousness at the hospital, then notices he’s cute and invites him to come by the Anglo-Bavarian restaurant she’s opening in south London, which will go on – as night follows day – to secure a rave review from Jay Rayner.
From there, we see our heroes cruise through the usual checkpoints of the upmarket rom-com relationship: they have passionate on-the-floor sex, they buy gleaming, perfect vegetables from a gleaming, perfect farm shop; they meander in a dopey haze through a park; their eyes sparkle with guarded delight as they realise that they’ve found someone, you know, special.
But storm clouds gather, as we know they must. There are rows – Almut, being the kind to fearlessly duck convention, isn’t sure she wants children, and lashes out at Tobias when he has the gall to ask where she stands on the matter. And, as foreshadowed, there’s the cancer, which comes roaring in to ruin what would otherwise be the Pinterest-perfect tale of two attractive London professionals settling down.
Line by line, Garfield and Pugh turn in impeccable performances. When Tobias is presented with an amuse-bouche at Almut’s restaurant, Garfield does a respectable job of conveying how transcendental his tiny piece of sausage is. Pugh convincingly embodies Almut’s pregnancy, and the birth scene, set in the bathroom of a petrol station, is lovely.
But the film never fully builds the case for why it should exist at all. There are some amusing lines, but it’s too rarely laugh-out-loud to be truly a comedy. And for a film being talked up as a weepie, it doesn’t put you through the ringer enough: there were more coughs than sniffs at the cinema screening I went to.
The trying Rubik’s cube chronology also limits the film’s ability to move or surprise. We know from the beginning that Almut’s cancer will return, so when she gets it the first time and appears to beat it, it doesn’t feel like much of a win. Watching her and Tobias then go through the motions of trying for a baby isn’t greatly involving either, given we’ve seen they later have a little girl, so we know a double line will turn up on the pregnancy tests eventually.
One compensation is the film’s unswerving, borderline pathological commitment to its own good looks. Everything in it looks beautiful all the time, even Almut when she’s throwing up, or when her sweet pixie nose is bleeding from chemotherapy. Her south London flat has fashionably distressed walls and covetable kitchen tiles; when she and Tobias move to the country, it’s to a chocolate-box farmhouse with an Aga and a hen coup. The horror of cancer, its messiness and ugliness, are largely tidied away.
The film’s jumbled timeline and folksy title are intended to say something, presumably; to leave us holding on to something after the credits have rolled. But precisely what that is is unclear. Are we to conclude that life should be lived in the here and now; that we “live in time”? It’s been noticed before. Or is the film’s great idea just that life is unpredictable, and that something that looks solid (a relationship like Almut and Tobias’s) can be rocked at any moment?
Still, as undemanding viewing goes, We Live In Time has much to recommend it. The script is decent, the interiors mouthwatering; it’s nice to see two of Britain’s biggest stars in the same room saying mostly sensible sentences in their native accents for once. And there is something appealingly sincere, even noble, about the efforts the film makes to take a subject as tough and depressing as cancer and give it mass appeal.
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