'We Live in Time' review: Exploring the back and forth of love

Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield cook up a classic romantic drama.

For an old-fashioned romantic drama, “We Live in Time” spends a surprising amount of its running time teaching the audience how to properly crack an egg. Crack it on a flat surface, not on the edge of the bowl, chef Almut (Florence Pugh) teaches her partner Tobias (Andrew Garfield), and plop the yolk into a small individual bowl first before you add it to the main mixing bowl. That way, she explains, you can fish out any wayward egg shards before they get into the big bowl.

If only life was so tidy. In reality, past and present get mixed together into one messy bowl, so that it becomes hard to distinguish one from another. And if a few shards get in there, they’re awfully difficult to fish out.

John Crowley’s winning film, taken from Nick Payne’s screenplay, attempts to capture this glorious mess of life by jumping back and forth in time across the decade of a relationship, from beginning to end. The chronological deck-shuffling doesn’t really add much emotionally to the story, which is engaging and poignant on its own thanks to the enormous chemistry of its two leads and sensitive filmmaking that prizes feeling over cliche.

We first meet Almut and Tobias fairly deep into the relationship, when they’re happily raising their adorable young daughter at a British country house. Almut is an acclaimed chef for a one-star Michelin restaurant, while Tobias does IT for a breakfast cereal company (Refreshingly, we see much more about the woman’s career in the film than the man’s, which seems too dull to even contemplate).

Their idyllic life is shattered when Almut is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It’s a reoccurrence of the disease that Almut hoped she had beat, and rather than go through chemo, Almut suggests that maybe this time they should focus on savoring the time they have left. 

She ultimately decides in favor of treatment, but also secretly accepts an offer to join the British team of an international baking competition. While it seems a little hard to believe she could deceive Tobias for very long, her ambition to do one last great thing with her career isn’t condemned by the film, but treated as intrinsic to her nature.

From there, “We Live in Time” jumps back in time to the beginning of their relationship, when Almut first runs into Tobias (literally, with her car), and to the middle, where they decide to become parents. There’s no aging makeup or other visual clues that we’ve shifted from one time period to the other, which can be a little disorienting, and honestly, if you put these scenes together in chronological order I don’t think the film would suffer at all.

What matters is the small, true moments that Garfield and Pugh conjure up together, making the audience truly believe that this is a real couple in love. Sometimes they say the wrong thing, sometimes they don’t say the right thing, but you feel them fumbling forward together. The sex scenes are frank and intimate, but so is an intense (and unexpectedly hilarious) birthing scene that occurs in the most unlikely of places.

Crowley (“Brooklyn”) and Payne, whose “Constellations” was staged at American Players Theatre last summer, never let the emotion spill over into sentimentality, always going for the perfect detail over the grand statement. Acting, writing, directing, even the minimalist score by The National’s Bryce Dessner – all the ingredients are here for a classic romantic drama.

“We Live in Time” is playing in a few theaters now and will go nationwide on Aug. 18. In Madison, it will play at Marcus Point, Marcus Palace, AMC Fitchburg 18 and Flix Brewhouse Madison.