Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh Shine in the Button-Pushing ‘We Live in Time’

After many years of bathing in the most egregious clichés and emotional trappings, the romantic drama desperately needs reinvention. Look no further than director John Crowley, who made a potential solution to a decaying genre with We Live in Time, a clichéd romantic story told in a scattershot, non-linear narrative. Its structure is highly communicative, too, juxtaposing moments of high-spirited joy and reward with devastating sorrow, a primer for audiences on the complicated mess life is. It often rewards, but most of the time, it never goes how we want it to. Crowley immediately gives us a taste of how he shapes a narrative that begins with a crushing diagnosis for Almut (Florence Pugh), which quickly shifts to her meet-cute with Tobias (Andrew Garfield). Well, it’s not ‘cute’ because Almut accidentally hit Tobias with her car after he ran to get some working pens to sign his divorce papers (oh yeah, that kind of movie). The two have an insatiable chemistry right from the get-go, but keep it at a distance for a while until it starts to get more serious. They’ve fallen madly in love with each other, which we see through fleeting vignettes of their highs (after many impossible tries, Almut is pregnant with her first child) and lows (Almut’s cancer has returned and is more aggressive).

This approach makes sense. Life is, after all, a series of fleeting memories. When we’re close to the end, our story flashes back in fragmented ways. We remember some of our purest, most joyful moments but also can’t bear the pain of our darkest, saddest days. The logical juxtaposition of both joy and sorrow works in isolation because remembering the best (and worst) parts of a romance is not a clear-cut, linear thing. Even when living an everyday, healthy life, we sometimes get flashes of moments that occurred many years ago, as if our repressed memories have suddenly returned to remind us of our greatest achievements and moments we would want to put in the rearview mirror and never think of again.