‘We Live in Time’ is Uneven and Underbaked

As it is framed as a story about a couple, 'We Live in Time' is an uneven endeavor that feels as though it’s a gender-swapped take on 'A Walk to Remember.'

A24

I left We Live in Time with tears in my eyes, walking in a bleary-eyed bubble filled with sweetness and love blown by the tender end of the romantic drama starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. The bubble burst when I overheard a man leaving the theater behind me saying to a friend, “He was such a pushover!”

In an instant, the bubble burst, and I was left to consider a wrinkle I felt in the film as I was watching, but that I wrote off as my own cynicism about romance. Time and again in the film, as Garfield’s Tobias returned to or forgave Pugh’s Almut, a small but mighty part of my brain wondered, Surely that must be the last straw? Surely people leave after such fights? I found myself, as I wept during the screening, telling that small but mighty part to believe in the power of love — This is a story about true love! I reminded myself. But when I heard the man stamp the label of “pushover” on Tobias, I began to consider the words of that small and mighty part, to interrogate what is really happening in this film, written by Nick Payne and directed by John Crowley.

The film follows couple Almut and Tobias, telling the story of their relationship in disjointed form. Almut is a chef working at a very fancy restaurant, and Tobias works a vague job at the corporate level of cereal company Weetabix. Tobias has just signed his divorce papers when he meets Almut, the two hit it off and begin dating. Almut is immensely competitive and aspires to become a renowned chef — she competes in cooking competitions and is incredibly innovative. She has a lively and vibrant family with whom she is very close; we learn that her beloved father passed away from cancer a few years ago. She used to figure skate at the competitive level, taking her family through the U.S. for competitions, but stopped after her father died. She does not want kids, but Tobias does, which is why his marriage ended. Almut changes her mind about kids when she is diagnosed with cancer for a second time; while she was able to beat it the first time, it has returned fatally. As the film goes on, and as the pieces of the couple’s relationship fall into place, what emerges is a very sweet and empowering story of a woman striving to achieve her dreams in the face of a terminal illness. Pugh plays Almut with passion and strength, fleshing her out as a fallible, dynamic woman, fiercely competitive and full of life, and defiantly more than her cancer diagnosis and the label of “mother.”

But the thing is, We Live in Time isn’t a character sketch. It isn’t so much a story of Almut’s life as it is the story of a couple, evidenced firstly by its confinement to the space of Almut and Tobias’s relationship, and secondly by its equal focus on each member of the couple. But even as it focuses with an even hand on the two, Almut emerges as, simply put, the better written character, while Tobias feels like a shadow of foil in her story.

It seems plenty obvious the logic behind why Almut is the better-written character of the two. As a romantic drama about a woman with cancer and the impact this has on the life of a couple, We Live in Time seems fearful of falling into comparisons with other similar films, and their respective pitfalls. For example, in A Walk to Remember, Mandy Moore’s Jamie is a young woman with cancer who falls in love with Shane West’s Landon; the couple is ostensibly the film’s focus, but the story seems to use the female character for the male character’s individuation. The film focuses predominantly on Jamie’s impact on Landon, she and her cancer become a plot device used to prompt his growth from teenager to adult, to move him toward becoming a fuller and more conscientious person. She remains the same peaceful and sage character throughout the film, which overwhelmingly seems preoccupied with the male character’s development and enrichment. We Live in Time flips the focus, working to flesh out the woman with cancer, excavate her psyche, and allow her to achieve her dreams. But in so doing, it doesn’t so much as destroy the function of the sanguine female character who prompts the main character toward individuation as it slots Tobias into it.

It is wonderful that this film depicts a person with cancer as fallible and full, not as perfect and flat as Moore’s Jamie; as a film about Almut, We Live in Time is compelling and Pugh in it is captivating, as she portrays the strong-willed Almut with muscle and humor, worries and aspirations, fears of mortality and desires for a legacy. But it also leaves Tobias not seeming like a full person, at Almut’s whim, following her directions and decisions. This relationship, which the film chronicles, seems not so much to include him in his humanity as to have him around for the sake of completing the couple. Tobias left his first marriage because his wife did not want children, and when Almut tells him the same, he stays with her because he loves her, which leaves one wondering whether Tobias loved his first wife at all. When Almut changes her mind after her diagnosis of stage-3 cancer and decides she wants to have a child, when she tells him she doesn’t want to go through the horrors of chemotherapy again — Tobias happily, elastically obliges. We don’t know Tobias’ aspirations other than that he wants kids, we don’t know much about his childhood in the way we do about Almut’s, all we know is that he loves and lives for Almut.

It is all well and good that the film is trying to subvert the trope of a sick dream girl, but it does leave us with a strange and uneven dynamic, with a deeply interesting character and her bland partner who we hardly know, who seems undeserving of her, unequal to her. That Tobias is enigmatic at all, isn’t boring, is purely because of Garfield, who infuses a modicum of charm and warmth into his character with his molten eyes and soft, wily grin. As Tobias is written, it’s hard to see him as an equal to someone as wonderful and dynamic, so endlessly interesting and skilled as Almut — he seems to lack a will, while she is all will and purpose. This is a film structured around a couple, but told as a character sketch, and as such, seems off kilter, so much so that when the film ends (spoiler alert, Almut’s terminal diagnosis is in fact terminal), the film feels eerily silent, suddenly too light as Pugh’s Almut’s presence is gone from it, because she was the reason for the plot’s movement, the reason why Tobias exists at all.

As it stands, as it is framed as a story about a couple, We Live in Time is an uneven endeavor that feels as though it’s a gender-swapped take on A Walk to Remember. It could work as a film about Almut, an up and coming chef working toward success while also balancing motherhood, a partner, and a cancer diagnosis. But as it stands, it can’t give Almut the full, in-depth, pensive consideration of a profile, beholden as it is to the timeline of the couple’s relationship. And as it stands, it paints an overwhelmingly unequal dynamic. I think what the man I overheard was trying to vocalize, when he called Tobias a pushover, was that the film doesn’t allow Tobias a voice for long enough to communicate his needs and desires, leaving him in a position that has historically been occupied by female characters: a personality-less sounding board for their partner. We don’t know enough about Tobias to call him a pushover, he lives much of his life outside of the life Almut lives on screen; but we know enough about Almut to fall in love with her ourselves.