We Live in Time

ROMANTIC DRAMA; 1hr 48min

STARRING: Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh


Profile piece: Garfield and Pugh

The gulf between tragedy and soap can feel more like a sidestep. Too much breast-beating is never a classy look while too little sentiment translates as all talk. When 34-year-old chef Almut (Pugh) learns that her stage-three ovarian cancer is back and the usual gutting course of chemo/surgery/chemo is the treatment plan, she and her partner, fellow Brit and Weetabix breakfast-cereal rep Tobias (Garfield), do talk and talk. But since they’re instantly so well drawn by Brooklyn director John Crowley and screenwriter Nick Payne, their dialogue is worth tuning into.

 

Almut isn’t interested in wasting her and Tobias’s time with ineffective therapy (“What happens if … you’re gonna realise that all you did was go bald and puke your guts up”). Her attitude is pertinent because time is on a non-linear loop in Crowley’s irregular scheme of things: without explanation or fanfare, the post-diagnosis scene is a flashback to Almut and Tobias’s anti-cute first meeting. Flash forward and the two of them are explaining Almut’s cancer to their three-year-old daughter (Grace Delaney). Next up, a spin through hot yet sensitive sex.

 

Old hands that they are, Garfield (The Social Network ) and Pugh (The Wonder ) slay every note on a tone scale that charts a groove through playful, passionate and combative to the tissue-soaking you just know is coming yet fall into anyway because you can’t help but be emotionally invested. Covering this lifetime of rocky ground is a performative ask for the two leads, whose every step is a fresh perspective, and especially gruelling for Pugh, Almut being the terrified, furious, mule-stubborn and desperately sick tsunami she is. Thanks to her stamina, this weepie has teeth.