‘We Live In Time’ Lives Up Its Own Bum

I’m going to tell you more or less everything that happens in ‘We Live In Time’ because a) you’re not going to see this movie and b) if you do see it, or have, you’ll need some confirmation that you just saw what you actually saw and aren’t, in fact, going insane. Though ‘We Live In Time’ purports to be a romantic drama about relationships and the ties that bind, many of the events that occur in the movie bear no actual resemblance to things that happen in reality. The movie is a mash note to dysfunction.

Florence Pugh plays a chef, because everyone in every movie and TV show is a chef now. But she’s not just a chef. She’s a genius chef. A chef with a Michelin star, because of her unique takes on “Anglo-Bavarian classics” or some such thing. She’s also, as we later learn, gay, or at least bisexual, or at least bicurious, though not actually curious, even if she tends to make some curious life choices. In addition to that, she’s a former Olympic-level champion figure skater. Just your average gal.

WE LIVE IN TIME  ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: John Crowley
Written by: Nick Payne
Starring: Florence Pugh, Andrew Garfield
Running time: 104 mins

Meanwhile, we have Andrew Garfield, who, in one of We Live In Time’s few quirky touches, is a mid-level executive at Weetabix. He’s going through a divorce, because his wife wants to focus on her career, and he just wants to have babies. The divorce makes him take sad baths.

One night, Florence Pugh hits Andrew Garfield with her car while he is sadly walking across the motorway in his bathrobe. Even though she is an impossibly sexy genius chef and former champion figure skater and he is a sad divorced mid-level executive at Weetabix who cries because he has no babies, she falls in love with him. She even decides she wants to have his baby even though she is basically a lesbian. Maybe it’s because he fills the apartment with candles when she comes home from work. Creating this fire hazard appears to be his only hobby.

Also, though the movie shows Florence Pugh as having loads of friends and a large, supportive family, as well as several hobbies and at least two careers, Andrew Garfield has no interests other than crying and lighting candles. He also has no friends other than his widowed father, who also cries a lot, and, in one bizarre scene, shaves Andrew Garfield’s neck while Andrew Garfield is crying in the bath.

These two lovebirds get together but, alas, Florence Pugh develops ovarian cancer. She chooses not to have a full hysterectomy so she can have sad Andrew Garfield’s baby. They have a hard time making a baby, so we see them going through in vitro fertilization in a montage accompanied by morose music, an odd choice because the movie spends many minutes watching them eat cheese, but doesn’t really linger over the fact that it’s hard to make a baby when the career-obsessed mother is missing one of her ovaries because of cancer surgery.

Regardless, we know they have a baby because we’ve already seen many scenes of them frolicking in pastoral bliss with what appears to be a nice five-year-old girl.

That’s right. We Live In Time has a non-linear narrative. So on top of everything else, we now already know that Florence Pugh’s cancer has returned, and it’s bad, and even though Andrew Garfield has planned their dream wedding like some lovelorn simp, she’s dodging it all because she’s secretly training to be on the United Kingdom’s A-Team for the Bocuse D’Or cooking competition. Even though she’s dying of cancer. And also, she doesn’t tell this important fact to the LOVE OF HER LIFE. This causes him to cry more and light more candles.

We Live In Time mixes together scenes of high-end cookery with people vomiting. Also, there are many sex scenes in this movie. We see a lot of Florence Pugh’s naked body. We even see her naked body when she is pregnant. Maybe we see a little of Andrew Garfield’s thigh at one point, but we don’t even see his butt. Florence Pugh’s boobs are in this movie so much, they deserve separate billing.

What is up with this movie? Pugh is a dying superwoman who’s still down to get naked and fuck. Garfield is a weepy empty vessel of a man who doesn’t even have mates to watch football with. Is this what millennials want? Is this who they are? What are we doing here? ARE WE NOT MEN?

The recent Netflix show One Day covered similar themes of love and loss, and was definitely a three-hanky British weeper, and it even played with time conventions a bit. But it did so in a realistic story grounded in character and incident and genuine humor. We Live In Time, on the other hand, barely seeks to define its male protagonist and wallows around in nostalgia, mostly for itself. She’s a jerk and he’s a weakling. What do they see in each other, besides their obvious movie-star attractiveness? Do they talk about anything besides eggs and making babies, which is actually just a more advanced form of eggs? What the hell is Anglo-Bavarian cuisine anyway?

We Live In Time’s best scene occurs midway through the timeline but quite late in the movie. Pugh must give birth to their once and future daughter in a gas-station restroom, because of a traffic jam on the M-Whatever. The scene is quite realistic and full of raw emotion, very well done by all. But then we flash forward in time humuna humuna years and Florence Pugh is absolutely nailing the Bocuse D’Or, crafting some sort of gelée mold out of an octopus corpse with her bright-eyed gender-fluid assistant who is clearly the one she wants to be with, not sad Andrew Garfield. These are weird people. This is a weird movie. I am going back in time right now to relive my experience of watching it in the theater. These are the moments of my life. Like sad Andrew Garfield, I am very sad.