Review of “We Live in Time” – Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh enchant in an emotional, touching film | Toronto Film Festival 2024

Turse was a warm late-summer surprise last month with the surprisingly thoughtful and sensitive adaptation of Colleen Hoover's supermarket bestseller It Ends With Us. It was a proud and powerful resurrection of the kind of glossy melodrama that had fallen terribly out of fashion, mostly relegated to the small screen and almost always the subject of easy mockery. Its shocking commercial success (nearly $300 million worldwide) will no doubt lead to more, but already, weeks later, premiering at the Toronto Film Festival, we have We Live in Time, another heartbreaking film, an intelligent and sensitive crowd-pleaser that should prove just as irresistible to passionate but underserved audiences.

There's a hint of the golden era of Working Title romantic comedies here, too, before that formula was harder to love and easier to parody. It's a story about attractive, sweary Londoners flirting and falling in love, but here they're also grappling with some knottier, less cozy problems. Given the trailer and the film's time-jumping structure, which flits back and forth, it's no spoiler that it also involves terminal cancer, a development that has become something of a red flag given the routine nature of many disease-of-the-week dramas. But Irish stage and screen director John Crowley, who had his biggest success with 2015's Brooklyn, has found a way to breathe life into a film about death, not necessarily seeking to reinvent the wheel but confidently banking on the power of big, honest emotions and two A-list stars who can easily sell them.

It's not that We Live in Time is entirely reliant on the all-star cast of Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield (the film has more going for it beyond their top-notch performances, too), but their chemistry is just so electric that it's hard to imagine how any of it could work as well without them. Both actors have already won us over with their charm, but we've never really seen them in territory like this, as most of their films require them to focus on the gloomier side of life. Pugh in particular has mostly shown her sunnier side off-screen, in interviews or on Instagram, but here she's a radiant romantic lead, playing a woman reluctant to define herself as a mere mother or wife. She's Almut, a chef who, weeks before the opening of her new restaurant, has an unlikely meeting with Garfield's Tobias, whom she hits with her car on the night he signs his divorce papers.

The timeline jumps between early courtship with sex on the floor, through a complicated pregnancy, and finally to Almut's diagnosis, the highs of long, relaxed weekends juxtaposed with the lows of short, difficult days of impossible choices. Playwright Nick Payne's script pulls this off without confusion, and without it feeling like a desperate ploy, something that embellishes a version of a story we've been told before. It's a structure that largely works, showing us the pain of figuring out how to spend precious time, although I'd argue the biggest drawback is that by scattering the more emotional third act scenes throughout the film, we're deprived of the escalation that would otherwise have led to the cathartic scream we expect at the end, which feels a little disappointing.

While much of the film is simply a compelling, elevated take on a familiar story, Payne's script finds something more interesting and less obvious about the desire to be remembered as a respected professional rather than just a beloved family member before one's death. It's particularly effective here from a woman's perspective, as Almut spends time secretly entering a major cooking competition, desperate to prove herself exceptional, and Pugh, as warm as she is here, has the believable sternness and seriousness of a chef (her real-life social media presence reveals she's an avid foodie).

It's a great joy to see two such confident and natural performers given the space to flex both movie star and actor muscles, showing their ease in comedy and drama. The film is also boldly but successfully isolated, giving other characters little chance to speak for long and focusing entirely on the two of them and the world they've created. Their softer, funnier and sexier scenes are more impactful than most romantic comedies we've seen in a long time, but their tougher, weightier conflicts are just as effective. Pugh is particularly great here in the flashier role, sometimes devastatingly so, proving once again that she's arguably the most consistent young actress working today. She's able to bring such complexity and hair-raising emotion to scenes we've seen a thousand times before, and in what's looking like a lean year for the Best Actress race, it would be unfair not to include her, although the film's dated elements may make it seem less Oscar-worthy at the moment.

I found the retro vibe of the film incredibly charming, a big, full-bodied romantic drama that knows exactly how to make us swoon and sad. I hope there's time for more of it.