Adding a second installment to his unofficial pair of decades-spanning dramas, director James Crowley hopes a little Pugh will wash the taste of Goldfinch out of our mouths. Like Goldfinch, Crowley’s latest, We Live In Time, takes place in multiple time periods, tracking the romance of Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) as he goes from her vehicular assault victim to the father of her child. We Live In Time purports to be told via a series of “snapshots,” presented out of order, allowing the two leads to “cherish each moment of the unconventional route their love story has taken.”
But when Almut and Tobias aren’t gazing deeply into each other’s eyes, they’re chatting about time. Garfield gives off an angel-of-death air in the trailer, frequently reminding Pugh that they’re running out of sand in the hourglass. We assume this is because her cancer diagnosis comes relatively early in the film, but given that this thing is sold on its collage structure, the diagnosis could be the movie’s last scene. We just don’t know and probably won’t know until we can see more than three minutes of footage.
Thankfully, nothing about Crowley’s epic romance has any of the uncanny de-aging of Robert Zemeckis’ multi-era drama, Here. Instead, Garfield continuously reminds his wife that they’re running out of time because she appears to be sick with cancer. Crowley smartly doesn’t go for digital effects, preferring different hairstyles to represent each period, which seems like a better, less distracting choice. All this indicates Crowley’s tapping back into the old-fashioned romance of Brooklyn, the sweet Oscar-nominated drama that remains the director’s height. However, the time-hopping structure does give us flashbacks to The Goldfinch.
Can Crowley marry epic romance to his fractured narrative tricks? We’ll find out when We Live In Time hits theaters on October 11.