A lot of movies that have themes of loss or death portray life as this precious thing to be held onto until an ultimately tragic ending.
An ending of great sorrow and an absence for those who survived around them, but “We Live in Time,” starring actors Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, brought a new version of what life is like when living with a clock.
There was death in this film, stated blatantly in the trailer and first scenes when sitting in the theater, but that was by no means the point of the story.
Yes there was tragedy, yes she had a terminal illness and yes a thousand tears were shed, but the movie was about life and how beautiful it can be to live life to its fullest.
Directed by John Crowley, this R-rated romantic drama followed two English characters, one a recently divorced man who works in IT named Tobias, and the other, a wildly ambitious chef named Almut, who find themselves falling in love all while reshaping their idea of life because of the future they see in one another.
However, like every tragically perfect love story, it is revealed very early on, and alluded to in the trailer, that Florence Pugh’s character has an illness that impacts her life on many levels.
Her personal and professional life are thrown out of order, and as a wife, a chef, a mentor and a mother, she has to choose how she will handle fighting off her disease whilst making the most of the time she has left.
But Crowley took a different approach to an overdone storyline of a girl falling in love, having a beautiful life, to only be then faced with the idea of it all ending and choosing a short time of bliss with a defined end or the idea of a longer life at the risk of spending her last few months withering away.
There was no sign of death, even in the dialogue between characters it was danced around.
A grave was never shown, Almut was never pictured as truly exhausted by her cancer and her life. Though she may have looked different she was the same strong and ambitiously passionate woman as the one we were introduced to in the beginning of the film and that’s what made it so powerful.
The movie was not displayed with a chronological storyline, but jumped from segments of the two characters’ lives to build up to a predictable but meaningful ending.
We saw glimpses of the couple together, dealing with the news of Almut’s diagnosis before seeing the two meet and fall in love, which happened to be when Almut ran over Tobias with her car. We then saw them cope with the illness alongside their daughter while at the same time watching the two figure out what they wanted out of their relationship, which turned out to be the simple yet incredible life and family Almut ended with.
Pugh and Garfield’s chemistry seemed so genuine alongside their attention to delivery as every joke got a laugh but every heartbreaking line hit home. They brought love to the screen and admiration I had never seen before, not just for one another but for Pugh’s career and Tobias’ selflessness to support the woman and life he loved.
The film was not in the perspective of a couple being ripped away from one another because of a terminal illness, or a woman who fought tooth and nail for her recovery.
The film showed what it’s like to love and have a passion strong enough to choose life with death over the possibility of life without, and it was honest and vulnerable and everything most movies are not.
“We Live in Time” was a movie about life and what it’s like to live and I could not recommend it highly enough.
With a 77% on the tomatometer and an 83% rating from the audience, the support beyond my opinion is substantial, but nonetheless I have moved it into my top four on letterboxd and I do not see anything knocking it off its pedestal any time soon.
