We Live in Time (2024)
Directed by: John Crowley
Premise: A professional chef (Florence Pugh) fights cancer while preparing for an international cooking competition. The story alternates her training and chemotherapy with her relationship to her husband (Andrew Garfield).
What Works: We Live in Time is primarily a love story between Almut and Tobias and the performances by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield make that part of the movie work. They are a believable couple and likable in a way that makes the viewer want to see them live happily ever after. The movie flashes backward in time to show us Almut and Tobias’ courtship and the birth of their daughter. The backstory gives a full sense of who they are individually and as a couple and sets up the present-day events. Cancer comes between them but so does Almut’s career as a professional chef. While undergoing chemotherapy, Almut is invited to represent the United Kingdom in a prestigious cooking competition. The preparation is strenuous and threatens the progress she’s making through chemotherapy. Almut goes ahead with the competition because cooking is so central to her identity and that is one of the better qualities of We Live in Time. In cancer dramas, the disease is often all consuming and the afflicted characters are defined by their sickness. The filmmakers are conscious of that and Almut speaks to this concern directly. She wants her life and memory to be more than just that of a cancer patient and the film dramatizes that struggle. The production design and cinematography are impressive. The domestic spaces are beautifully shot but they also look organic and lived in.
What Doesn’t: Almut and Tobias have a daughter and this child is a key part of their relationship; in the backstory we find out that Almut was reluctant to become a mother and she later suffers ovarian cancer. However, once the child is a part of their lives, the daughter is mostly an afterthought in the rest of the story. We don’t get much of Almut and Tobias as parents nor does the daughter have an identity of her own. We Live in Time is told in a nonlinear fashion. The story flashes backward to dramatize Almut and Tobias’ courtship but the organization of the narrative is all over the place. There’s no logic to the arrangement of scenes and it is often confusing. Like a lot of cancer narratives, We Live in Time tends toward sentimentality and it has a lot of moments that seem to be obligatory in this genre. While it’s done well, we’ve seen a lot of this before.
Bottom Line: We Live in Time is a familiar cancer drama distinguished by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield’s performances. Its emphasis on life as opposed to sickness is welcome and We Live in Time is well made if overly familiar.
Episode: #1024 (November 24, 2024)