We Live In Time Wastes The 1 Thing That Makes It Interesting

Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh star in "We Live in Time," which tells the story of a couple's romance nonlinearly.Peter Mountain/A24It’s a tale as old as time: Two people meet, fall in love, and build a life together, warts and all.It’s also a tale as old as time that how someone chooses to tell a story matters, sometimes just as much as what the story is.

Advertisement The central conceit of “We Live in Time” is that the romance between its central characters, Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and Almut (Florence Pugh), is told nonlinearly.We get dropped into various periods of their relationship, like flipping through a stack of assorted snapshots of their lives.

If only that intricate and itinerant structure made a difference in the emotional experience of the film.Using a novel storytelling approach in an otherwise conventional relationship drama only works if it adds something to the story.

That creative decision has to mean something, especially when the whole film, directed by John Crowley and written by Nick Payne, is predicated on that choice.But in “We Live in Time,” an otherwise interesting storytelling choice ends up being a colossal waste of time.

All of this — for what?From scene to scene, it’s easy enough to figure out where we are in the progression of the couple’s relationship, based on dialogue and context clues.In its opening act, the film establishes some mile markers, like Almut about to give birth, or finding out she has an aggressive form of cancer, or what you eventually realize is the couple’s meet-cute.

From there, viewers can generally piece together the order.Advertisement Unfortunately, it’s hard to argue that the film’s nonlinear structure changes the overall effect of watching it.Once you put the pieces together, there’s no “a-ha!” moment or emotional payoff.It’s not like seeing the relationship out of order adds an extra significance to certain scenes, or makes you see an earlier development i...