Review: We Live in Time (2024)
The most unfortunate casualty of the post-pandemic theatrical landscape remains the near erasure of Hollywood adult dramas–films like Jerry Maguire and As Good as It Gets that connect with casual moviegoers while garnering significant awards attention. However, despite a film culture that increasingly reserves the big screen for franchise properties and obscure indies striving for Oscar buzz, an artfully crafted tearjerker like We Live in Time can occasionally still will itself into being to remind largely disengaged audiences of the role bigscreen romances once held in our collective imagination.
Breaking from its typical slate of art-horror and twee hipster touchstones like Everything Everywhere All at Once, boutique studio A24’s decision to back a Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield vehicle that traces the development of a couple’s relationship from meet cute to cancer diagnosis via a cavalcade of flashbacks and forwards is a welcome departure. Though its mass appeal deviates sharply from A24’s reputation for cutting-edge fare, this tale of an on-the-rise British chef who meets a divorced cereal conglomerate IT guy is no lazy late 90s Julia Roberts dramedy. It’s a generous and unflinching character study of what unexpected love does to career-minded thirtysomethings who yearn for storybook romance but ultimately realize that the inescapable conflict and pain of real connection is worth it.
With Brooklyn director John Crowley at the helm, the film avoids grand gestures as it painstakingly unspools its love story in scenes so specific and intimate they resonate universally. Even when the film teeters on the edge of slapstick, the characters’ classic Hollywood charm manages to merge these moments of levity within a love story so grand and fully realized that no film in recent memory could serve as a rival. As it reaches its bittersweet end, We Live in Time makes a case not just for the power of undying love but for the enduring power of the movies in general.
We Live in Time opens Friday in theaters.