Almut and Tobias, the two people at the center of the new romance “We Live in Time,” are in many ways the perfect movie couple.
They meet cute when she hits him with her car when he’s coming back in his bathrobe from the store where he went on a midnight run to buy pens so he could sign his divorce papers. They date cute. Pop songs play when they have cute sex. And their cute daughter is born after not one but two separate cute we’re-having-a-baby scenes.
Oh, and she has cancer, which wouldn’t be so cute except for the most perfect of all the things about this perfect couple: They’re played by a perfect pair of actors in Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.
In a movie whose setup almost inevitably leads to rampant sentimentality, Pugh and Garfield are enormously charming actors who are also skilled at undercutting their own charm. They commit to the sentiment without yielding to it, making “We Live in Time” a truly charming and surprisingly rich film.
The movie premiered on Friday night at a Toronto International Film Festival that is already long on films embracing sentimentality and even sappiness, “Nutcrackers” and “The Friend” among them. “We Live in Time” is the most satisfying of the bunch, as the ovation it received at the Princess of Wales Theatre on Friday night suggested.
When he introduced the film prior to the screening, director John Crowley quoted the Lou Reed song “Magic and Loss (The Summation)”: “There’s a bit of magic in everything / And then some loss to even things out.” And let’s face it: Precious few romantic comedies can reference Lou Reed without embarrassing themselves.
The Irish director Crowley has made intimate and exquisite films in the past, particularly “Brooklyn” in 2015, but he stumbled when he followed that film with the clunky “The Goldfinch” in 2019. “We Live in Time,” though, with its two big stars and a structure that allows the film to acknowledge tragedy without dwelling on it, is a strong recovery, a crowd-pleaser with real heart.
The setup comes with a twist: We meet Almut when she’s taking a morning jog through her perfect rustic English garden to her henhouse to gather eggs and whip up a perfect breakfast for Tobias, who’s still in bed. In the next scene, she’s suddenly very pregnant, sitting on the toilet; then she’s in the Michelin-starred restaurant she co-owns, whipping up something delicious before doubling over in pain and learning that her ovarian cancer has returned and will need aggressive treatment.
The film jumps between timelines; in one scene Almut and Tobias argue about her disinterest in having kids, in the next they’re doting over their daughter. Her illness is a constant presence, but the film is edited so that happy moments are never far away, and never feel cheap when they arrive. And there’s a bittersweet question that hangs over all of the shifting chronologies: Would it be better to have “six really amazing months” or “12 really s—ty passive ones” of aggressive treatment that has no guarantee of working?
There’s a charming playfulness in the dynamic between Pugh and Garfield, and it’s echoed in Bryce Dessner’s music, which defaults toward the upbeat and rarely tries to milk the emotion.
Of course “We Live in Time” gets more serious and sadder as the story plays out; after a while, flashbacks start to lose their value and the couple’s ticking clock asserts itself. But it’s balance that John Crowley is after: You can call it Lou Reed’s magic and loss, and you can thank Crowley, Pugh and Garfield for knowing how to deliver it.
