Weep For the Beautiful People in WE LIVE IN TIME

Who gets to be tragic in Hollywood?

John Crowley’s We Live In Time is an old-fashioned romantic weepy updated with some formal and genre twists; the film is told in non-linear chronological order and doubles as a sports competition film.

The tweaks are meant to provide an arty gloss, but they also create a sense of calculated string-pulling which compounds the emotional manipulation endemic to deadly-disease stories. Worse, perhaps, the excess of classiness, and the competition genre cameos, suggest that you need a certain level of polish and meritocratic success before your tragedy can matter.

If you put the plot back into linear order, We Live in Time centers on Tobias Durand (Andrew Garfield), a recently divorced Wheetabix executive and former figure skater turned pioneering high-end chef Almut Brühl (Florence Pugh.) They meet cute when Almut runs Tobias down in her car. Soon they are having transcendent and tastefully filmed sex, and contemplating having a child together. That’s put on hold when Alma contracts ovarian cancer…but treatment is effective, and they have a little girl, Ella (Grace Delaney).

Three years later, the cancer recurs, and Alma is torn between pursuing a treatment she suspects won’t work and competing in the world chef competition Bocuse d'Or. She promises Tobias she will focus on her recovery, but instead trains for the competition, advancing to the European finals.

Films like this aren’t necessarily about the plot; the focus is the relationships and the emotions elicited from both actors and viewers. In that sense, the non-linear storytelling works well, enabling the director and leads to layer each event with a sense of what will happen and what has happened. Tobias and Almut’s relationship seems simultaneously foreordained and doomed.

Garfield and Pugh are both extremely charismatic performers, and watching them flirt and emote together is dazzling—for better and maybe for worse. They are so perfect that the film about everyday tragedies sometimes feels like a glowing advertisement of itself and its stars. A montage of Tobias and Alma celebrating her remission at a carnival, complete with merry-go-round, bumper cars, and uplifting anonymous pop song, feels like a parody of rom com clichés—as, in a different way, does Alma’s quirky didn’t-make-it-to-the-hospital birthing scene.

The core thematic problem of the movie is expressed in an intense scene in which Tobias realizes that Alma has been practicing for the cooking competition on the sly. She tearfully explains that she wants her daughter to remember her as an active achiever, not just as a tragic absence who died

It’s a painful and affecting speech. But it also resonates uncomfortably with the fact that it’s being spoken by Florence Pugh, who still looks very much like a movie star even with a shaved head. Is this story only worthwhile or memorable because Alma is a world-class chef? Is it only worthwhile or memorable because Pugh and Garfield are heartthrobs?

Disability and disease are ubiquitous; they come for all of us eventually. On screen, though, the tragedy of disability is often specifically a tragedy about beautiful people in beautiful relationships failing to get everything they deserve. The movie uses its non-linear montage to show us the full beauty and charm of this life, which is inseparable from the beauty and charm of the affluent, gorgeous, talented protagonists.

Film captures life in motion; it’s a medium which mimics and reproduces the sense of life lived. The sense is an illusion though, not least because of the way that Hollywood heightens and glamorizes; you watch the people on screen not because they’re us, but because they’re better than us. Who is the “We” in We Live in Time? Does it include people who aren’t master chefs or people who don’t have Hollywood good looks? Alma worries that her tragedy won’t move people, or won’t have meaning, unless she’s exceptional. I’m not as sure as I’d like to be that the movie disagrees.