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I went into We Live In Time at a free screening with absolutely no knowledge of what it was about. The movie started really well, as it starred the talented Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield who performed just as amazingly in this movie as any other. It had some decently funny lines and scenes, and overall I was compelled to see how their relationship would grow, but… the longer the movie went on, the less connected to the characters I felt. I was just waiting for the plot twist to come, to shock me and to make me care again, but as the credits rolled I realized that it was just a predictable letdown :/
Caution: this will contain spoilers!!
We Live In Time is a movie about Tobias and Almut, who hit it off unexpectedly after Almut hits Tobias with her car and sends him to the hospital. Almut has a history of ovarian cancer but has overcome it with chemotherapy procedures. Unfortunately, it eventually returns to her and she decides that instead of another year of tumultuous procedures that may not even work, she wants to live her life to the fullest for the last few months.Â
The concept makes it obvious that the producers want you to cry while watching this, especially because during the screening I attended, theater workers handed out tissues before the movie started. However, the film is written in a nonlinear structure where the scenes skip around, seemingly at random. I’m not averse to this structure, but it has to serve a purpose. For example, the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind uses non-chronological time skipping, but it is required and beautifully curated for unraveling the mystery of what happened between Clementine and Joel. It was integral to the story. However, in We Live In Time, there was no mystery. The time jumps were used to spoil the movie itself, so we were always ahead of the characters. We knew the beginning of the end fully, with no twists or averting expectations, before we even saw them meet. It completely destroyed the build-up arc that is absolutely necessary in a romance movie. Because all it is, is a romance movie that is pretty generic to the genre, and while it could have worked in that role regardless, they chose to implement a gimmick to fill some theme around time and “life flies by” to make the movie seem more interesting than it really is.
I think this also connects back to another issue I had: I could not relate or empathize with the characters as the movie went on. Part of this definitely relates to the time skipping which left me feeling like I lost time watching them fall in love. I can admit that there were sweet scenes between them; the labor scene was stressful but still endearing, but nonetheless, I couldn’t really believe their relationship and it felt surface level. Not like some deep “unconditional love despite death” kind of thing.