The Insecure, Needy 'We Live in Time' Will Make You Swipe Left

We Live in Time, a throwback blend of awards-friendly sentimentality with bursts of 90s-era Richard Curtis comedy has likeability on its mind. It stars two British actors, Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, who never fail to exude charm and selective enough in their projects that a new one is more likely than not to excite us. The film, directed by Brooklyn and The Goldfinch director John Crowley, puts Garfield and Pugh in the center frame as a devoted London couple whose typical relationship hangups – indecisiveness, miscommunications, insecurities – are electrified by fraught milestones: difficult pregnancies, terminal illness, and the existential fear of what moments we’ll be remembered by.

Almut (Pugh) is a chef on the verge of opening a restaurant serving Anglo-Bavarian cuisine when she hits Tobias (Garfield), a divorced Weetabix (a British cereal brand) employee, with her car,. This meet-cute is the starting pistol for a head-over-heels romance for the pair. Tobias is nebbish, neurotic, and sensitive to a fault; Almut is decisive, driven, and suffers no fools. They’re everything each other is looking for; they couldn’t be more different. At least, this is what’s suggested by the familiar romance plot. However, the characters are far more limply written than is needed for an effectively weepy melodrama about raising a child and facing cancer.

The film jumps around a decade in a non-linear fashion (screenwriter Nick Payne wrote a similar time-hoppy relationship drama in his hit play Constellations) that livens up the immediate experience of piecing together a relationship. But as a structural device, it is too unambitious to make We Live in Time anything more than passingly pleasurable. The film uses attractive, charming leads and a deliberate but undercooked storytelling gimmick to justify a flat and frequently bizarre story. Beyond the film’s most intriguing and marketable elements, there’s barely anything substantive underneath.