‘We Live in Time’ Review: Great moments don’t make a great film

Time is broken open gracefully and then gently whipped in director John Crowley’s would-be weiner We live in time– just like the way the main character Almut, a top chef played by Florence Pugh, handles eggs.

WE LIVE IN TIME ★★1/2 (2.5/4 stars) Led by: John Crowley Written by: Nick Payne With: Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh, Lee Braithwaite, Douglas Hodge Duration: 107 mins

As the film begins, we see her picking a few of the chickens in the chicken coop outside her rustic cottage to make a morning soufflé. Later in the film, but much earlier in the film’s world, she buys half a dozen of them from the supermarket to make an omelet in her London apartment, hoping to impress Andrew Garfield’s Tobias, a divorcee with whom she is pursuing a marriage meeting went out. not so sweet. (She runs him over with her Mini Cooper). Your gastronomic temptation works.

But is Crowley’s gentle tussle a romantic drama? Brooklyn The director’s attempt to escape film prison The goldfinch Theater box office And critical defeat—equally successful?

Yes, but only in individual bites, not as a whole meal.

By crisscrossing time frames, Crowley, based on a script by playwright Nick Payne, slows down the momentum of his film and weakens the overall impact of the central love story. It doesn’t help that at the end of all this time travel we come to a solution that belongs in another movie entirely.

But the unusual format also allows Crowley to deliver unforced moments of such startling and rarely seen intimacy, brought to emotional life by the astonishingly expressive faces of the two leads, that you almost don’t care that the film they’re watching contains, does not completely hang together.

We see Almut and Tobias in a bathtub eating chocolate chip cookies from her pregnant belly, an example of sublime calm after the couple’s harrowing difficulties getting pregnant, including having to have a cancerous ovary removed. (It’s one of three scenes in which we witness Garfield folding his lanky body into a tub, and each is better than the last.)

We linger in the soft light of her garden as Tobias and her daughter Ella (Grace Delaney) cut Almut’s hair, anticipating that she will lose it again due to chemotherapy if her cancer comes back.

And we share nervous and heartbroken smiles as they find nourishment in chocolate given to them by a kindly oncologist (Irish actor Niamh Cusack) who has no good news to share.

The film delivers reasonably well in the big moments – when the couple gets stuck in traffic on the way to the hospital and Almut has to give birth to her baby in a gas station toilet – but it’s the details that make the film stand out comes to life and reminds you that one of the great joys of going to the movies is seeing incredibly attractive and emotionally skilled people simply experiencing life as it happens.

Here we have the engagingly vulnerable Garfield, working again with the director who first introduced the British-American actor to the world with 2007 Boy A. The former Spider-Man seems to spend the entire film with tears on the precipice of his eyelids, like children on a high dive afraid to jump. (Speaking of crying, at the screening I attended they were handing out packs of tissues marked A24, the film’s distributor, an act reminiscent of the barf bags John Waters handed out before the screening pink flamingos; For the record, mine remained unopened.)

Then there’s Pugh, whose broad face and sparkplug demeanor bring to mind a sportier version of the noir gamine Gloria Grahame. (Pugh’s character used to be a competitive figure skater, and you can believe it.) She’s a cinematic alley cat, looking for a cuddle one moment and clawing your eyes out the next.

Garfield and Pugh are great together and the film falters in most cases when they aren’t on the same page.

This includes the time Almut spends at a cooking competition when she should be focusing on her health. It’s a decision that puts Tobias in a difficult position – she initially hides it from him – and is no better for us as an audience. A film that highlights moments so intimate that they are rarely if ever seen by those not involved in it has no business staging its emotional conclusion on the set of a second-rate television cooking show Beat Bobby Flay.