We Live in Time review – every gen­er­a­tion gets the can­cer romance it deserves

Every gen­er­a­tion gets the can­cer romance it deserves. In We Live in Time, ter­mi­nal ill­ness gives an extra sense of urgency to an echt-mil­len­ni­al sto­ry about the push-pull of pro­fes­sion­al ambi­tion and fam­i­ly oblig­a­tion – the desire to make the most of the time you have. Almut (Flo­rence Pugh) is a chef who starts the film by whip­ping up a ​“Dou­glas fir par­fait” and ends it tweez­ing micro­greens onto a decon­struct­ed seafood tow­er; in between, she earns a Miche­lin star for her ​“mod­ern Euro­pean takes on clas­sic alpine dishes.”

She and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) meet cute when she Meet Joe Blacks him with her car as he wan­ders out into traf­fic to pick up a piece of choco­late orange; she’s a mag­net­ic chef on the rise and he’s a new­ly-divorced sad­sack, and it’s dif­fi­cult to see what she sees in him aside from a screen­writer­ly con­trivance. She feeds him well, he eats it up; she offers excite­ment and plea­sure, and he keeps her reg­u­lar (he works for Weet­abix), don­ning read­ers and assid­u­ous­ly tak­ing notes at all her doctor’s appointments.

The film unfolds over three time­lines, delin­eat­ed by Almut’s three dis­tinct hair­styles. Across their courtship, they argue over whether they should con­tin­ue their rela­tion­ship giv­en their asym­met­ric feel­ings about hav­ing chil­dren – he wants them, but she’s not sure, until her first ovar­i­an can­cer diag­no­sis scares her into fer­til­i­ty; the twee score by Bryce Dess­ner of The Nation­al swells when the preg­nan­cy test final­ly returns a pos­i­tive result. On the day their daugh­ter is born, direc­tor John Crow­ley push­es epic set-pieces: pulling the Mini out of a tight park­ing space to dri­ve to the hos­pi­tal; Tobias feed­ing Almut jaf­fa cakes in the bath between con­trac­tions; and an epic birth in a petrol sta­tion loo, with Pugh on all fours, scream­ing and sweat­ing in a suit­ably vir­tu­oso per­for­mance – onscreen and off, Pugh nav­i­gates her fame with a con­stant aura of Main Char­ac­ter Ener­gy, which fits the dri­ven Almut and gives the film an appeal­ing­ly sub­stan­tial melo­dra­mat­ic scope.

Tick­ing clocks are the major motif here: a thir­tysome­thing career woman’s bio­log­i­cal clock and the min­utes between con­trac­tions; the kitchen timers count­ing down the min­utes to ser­vice, and sec­onds left in the com­pe­ti­tion to which Almut stakes her lega­cy; the life expectan­cy of a can­cer patient no longer respond­ing to chemo, and how many more achieve­ments, or mem­o­ries, she can hope to pack in.

The time-hop­ping chronol­o­gy is an elab­o­rate struc­tur­al con­ceit in con­ver­sa­tion with the film’s theme, but it feels rather manip­u­la­tive – a way for the nar­ra­tive to with­hold reveals and build to three cli­max­es, and to hop­scotch from high­light to high­light when­ev­er things threat­en to become too prosaic.

Both actors are the wrong age for their char­ac­ters but both are out­side aging in a mois­turised movie-star kind of way, so the film seems to just float between high­lights like a Great­est Hits album with a chrono­log­i­cal track list­ing. This is sim­ply a gener­ic and bru­tal­ly effi­cient tear­jerk­er – like its title, it aspires to arche­typ­al grandeur and lands some­where blander.