We Live in Time belongs to a hardy, much-loved and critically maligned movie subtype, the Dying Lover Romantic Weepie - a genre so generic that the most famous example is literally titled Love Story. That was more than 50 years ago, and we as a society have evolved to the point that heroines no longer die of what Roger Ebert once called “Ali MacGraw’s Syndrome” and the rest of us just refer to as Mysterious Movie Wasting Disease.
No, in We Live in Time, the diagnosis, delivered early on, is as horribly specific - ovarian cancer - as the film itself is oddly mild. Written by Nick Payne (The Last Letter From Your Lover) and directed by John Crowley (Brooklyn), it’s a time-hopping marriage story that seems to want to wring our tears but is too timid or tasteful to really do so. There is one fresh narrative idea here, but it takes forever to get to it.
One reason we go to the movies, of course, is to watch attractive people and have a good cry, and Time at least fulfills the first part of the bargain. Andrew Garfield plays Tobias and Florence Pugh plays Almut, and because this is a British production, the two actors get to keep their accents. Tobias does something for a living that’s mentioned once or twice and promptly forgotten because it’s not important to the story, but Almut is a talented and fiercely ambitious London chef, which makes We Live in Time a little like The Bear, if Carmy had a terminal illness. (Almut’s specialty is Bavarian fusion, and if there’s a joke in there, the movie doesn’t make it.)