WE LIVE IN TIME (John Crowley 2024)

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FLORENCE PUGH, ANDREW GARFIELD IN WE LIVE IN TIME

[B]JOHN CROWLEY: WE LIVE IN TIME (2024)

Much ado: an arresting scrambled-time film that doesn't quite cohere

For We Live in Time, Andrew Garfield has returned to the Irish director of his 2007 feature debut Boy A. The distracting, unfortunate screenplay for this new film was written by Nick Payne, whose plays have been successful on the West End and Broadway. Not so much luck in his three produced screenplays, the first one of which got a Metascore of sixty, the next two in the fifties. The flaw this time is not in the excellent actors, Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.

I could have quite enjoyed watching a movie with Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield together: they make a volatile couple. She's only 28 and a live wire. He's 41 and has mellowed. He used to be boyish but now he's maturely boyish. There is great chemistry here, and in an on screen duo publicity appearance they seem to be having a very good time together. I was a fan of Andrew from Boy A to Spider Man to The Social Network, Hacksaw Ridge and the rest. He does seem to have a propensity for weepies sometimes, and that's what We LIve in Time certainly is. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle, who tends to be blunt, calls it "death porn." And he warns you not to see it. I can't recommend it, and need not, since it seems to be doing very well for an indie film at the box office.

The film and Payne's screenplay go, to the destruction of all else, for the big noisy moments. No time for lying down here, except for sex, but no time for that either: only the aftermath is shown. Almut (Pugh) even has a baby standing up, and when she's got stage 3 uterine cancer, she goes jogging in Italy and enters and appears to win a high-pressure, high-speed culinary competition. The laurels go not to the most exquisite taste here, but to who can set up complicated fancy-cuisine dishes fastest. So she's a chef. But she and her assistant both address each other as "chef." Very democratic.

The chopped-up chronology causes pregnancy and the onset of cancer to get confused. When Almut bends over with pain at the restaurant we're not sure if it's labor pains or cancer coming on. Such fast and loose play with narrative order is alienating. It reminded me of the cloying experience I once had in Paris of watching Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen's Broken Circle Breakdown, a florid operatic film in fractured chronology.

Whether Almut is very brave, or selfish, or foolhardy (in a selfish way) is highly debatable. But this is mainly a woman's picture. We get a look at Almut's profession, though she's barely ever in the kitchen because of the culinary competition; but all we get to know about Garfield's character is that he's recently divorced and spends a lot of his time with Almut, and when Tobias (Garfield) puts in any time on his job as an executive for a breakfast cereal company is hard to say.

The early sequences play around with chronology ruthlessly, getting the most intensive and disorienting of the film's choppy-editing treatment. Almut and Tobias are dealing with her disease, then they meet; that kind of thing. (The meet cute is abrupt and violent: she hits him with her car.) The filmmakers basically don't care where we are (we are in time, though, remember!), so long as it's a high-adrenalin moment. Perhaps the most memorable scene is one in which Tobias explains, with terribly awkward hesitations (British ones, since he's in his Brit mode), that the fact that she's 34 and can find nothing interesting about having a baby will be quite a sticking point for him because , well, he's not sure, but (do we know the actor is 41? unclear) he probably does want to have one. She goes off on him and the F-words hit the fan; he walks out.

But we've already seen them tenderly together as she learns about a recurrence of cancer so serous that they cannot operate before a course of chemo. The scene about having a baby is a good scene, and would be a much better one in a film that presented it in a more meaningful context. Here there is no context, only big scenes, with yelling, crying, and mumbling. (Not much time, happily, for smartphones, but also no time for a sense of ordinary everyday life.)

This becomes a how-to film for situations under stress. How to give birth in the loo of a convenience store when the door jams. How to approach the end of life when you don't think you've done enough - though you're a chef at a fancy restaurant in your early thirties and you've got a nice husband and a kid called Ella (Grace Delaney),) . How to take part in a European culinary competition when the cancer and the chemo are making you throw up. Not, however, how to die.

At one point Almut and Tobias are considering how to break it to the kid that she may very well be dying, and she thinks of getting a dog. You don't really want to kill a dog to teach the kid about death? he asks. No, but we could just get a very old one, she replies. Never heard that one before.

So there you are. Every scene of this film matters intensely, but when you add them all up, altogether nothing really quite matters at all. The film doesn't take the time to create a convincing, relatable context. The actors, as good actors do, play each individual scene very well. Garfield is his sensitive, soulful self, with a new level of maturity and confidence. Pugh is a firecracker. She's fascinating to watch. She's a terrific actress, of the high-energy, force-of-nature kind. People remember her from LIttle Women and Midsommar but I remember her most from William Oldroyd's sui generis and rather alarming 2016 Lady Macbeth, which shows how dangerous and powerful she can be. That makes you realize: We Live in Time is too busy being a weepie to make Almut a well-rounded character.

Andrew Garfield has a weakness for weepies, as mentioned, as also with the creepy Never Let Me Go. I've liked it, and he's been surprising, when he has taken on something very challenging, like Red Rider or Hacksaw Ridge or even Scorsese's handsomely made slog, Silence, for which he and the other principals lost dangerous amounts of weight. He is always worth watching. But occasionally what he's in, isn't.

IndieWire's David Ehrlich, who loves this film, explains that it " futzes with time in order to shrink the distance between happiness and heartache," which enables it to be, in a grand genre he links with Brief Encounter, what he calls "a heaving sob of a movie." That explains what the film is doing pretty well. But when I feel toyed with, I can't be convinced, and the places where I'm moved in this film, like the childbirth sequence, don't fit into a coherent whole.

Here again us the quotation about my late friend and masterful editor Richard Todd that I began my review of Greta Gerwig's Little Women with: "Todd — everyone called him that, did't they? — had so many useful nuggets of editorial wisdom, which he always managed to deliver in as few words as possible. One of them, I remember, was: 'Chronology is your friend.' By which he meant: Don't scramble the time frame of your narrative just to appear artful to the reader when simple chronology might work better." ("The Lives They Lived, Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year", in NYTimes Magazine).

We Live in Time, 108 mins., debuted Sept. 7,m 2024 at TIFF; also San Sebastien, Rio, and BFI. US theatrical release Oct. 18. Watched at Cinemark Century Hilltop 16, Richmond, Calif., Oct. 29, 2024. Metacritic rating: 5̶8̶%̶ 59%.