In Nick Payne’s play Constellations, a man and a woman meet, date, break up, marry, eventually receive a life-changing medical diagnosis, in a story told with dozens of iterations and micro-variations on different scenes. It’s as if infinite universes are branching off from their initial meeting. It’s a very good play. Payne also wrote the screenplay for We Live in Time, wherein a man and a woman meet, date, etc., and eventually receive a life-changing medical diagnosis. Because the scenes are shown out of chronological order, mentioning the diagnosis is not a spoiler; it occurs roughly five minutes into the movie. There are not variations with different outcomes, but, as in Constellations, the timeline becomes scattered, emphasizing moments that rhyme and connect, rather than a strictly linear progression.
Most people who see We Live in Time will not have seen Constellations, so it may not be fair to compare the two – to wonder why this material has been repeated, its own alternate-universe variation minus the bigger-picture profundity, ultimately feeling like a watered-down version. Yet the film has made the comparison unavoidable to anyone who has seen both, and I think even those who know nothing of Constellations may sense something missing from We Live in Time – perhaps an observation with greater depth than the title.
The movie is never unpleasant to watch, though perhaps a bolder version of it would be, at least momentarily. The narrative moves on three timelines, intercut: In the earliest, moist-eyed corporate worker Tobias (Andrew Garfield) has a particularly pronounced meet-cute with ambitious chef Almut (Florence Pugh), just as he’s finalizing his divorce, and the two embark upon a new relationship, encountering a few stumbling blocks along the way. Some time later, in the second timeline, Tobias and Almut are imminently expecting a child, leading to a less-than-ideal birthing situation that doubles as the film’s most impressive sustained sequence (and one that would be notably difficult to pull off on stage). And some years after that, their preschool-aged daughter happy and healthy, Almut learns that her cancer, previously treated into remission, has returned.
Run together, these threads form a more-or-less complete picture of the relationship, albeit skipping over their first few years of parenthood. Scrambling the stories together allows Payne and director John Crowley to strategically withhold certain pieces of information that emerge later, in different timelines, shifting perspective on scenes that have already come and gone. But perhaps wary of turning the movie into an ongoing parlor trick, that only happens a few times, creating a buzz of puzzle-piece recognition that quickly fades. Beyond that, and a few rudimentary bits of image-rhyming (cutting from a diner meal in one timeline to a diner meal in another; a bedroom to a bedroom; and so on), the temporal games don’t yield much insight or even showy emotional fireworks. In its accessible, entirely mainstream, borderline-Richard Curtis way, We Live in Time is as impenetrable as an art film, in that it’s never really clear why we’re meant to experience this particular story this particular way – or even, really, what this particular story is.
Pugh and Garfield can certainly fake it, though the latter tends to do better in roles or movies that push back against his perpetually emo woundedness. Still, they’re stars, and they do what’s required of them: They carry We Live in Time on their backs and frequently make a convincing case that you’re watching a real movie about love and loss and connection and other stuff that sometimes flashes in quick succession in movie trailers when a vaguely humanist relationship movie doesn’t know how else to sell itself. Ignoring Pugh’s tartness and Garfield’s yearning – difficult, but not impossible! – will reveal characters who are only simulating the mechanics of everyday life, not living them. Mostly, they are waiting for the next big scene (or the next small scene to be inflated by its presence alongside a big scene). The most idiosyncratic thing we learn about Tobias or Almut is that they both really like a particular brand of English cookie. Even more frustrating: The film has the lovely ending, the kind engineered by a dramatist with a delicate touch. For a whole play full of scenes like this, seek out Constellations. For a touch-and-go exercise in hoping the audience will fill in not just the narrative blanks but the emotional ones, there’s We Live in Time.
Director: John Crowley
Writer: Nick Payne
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh, Marama Corlett, Adam James
Release date: Oct. 11, 2024
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including The A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, The Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.
