If I wanted to show a Martian how irritating young London professionals can be, I’d buy him a ticket to We Live in Time.
It’s meant to be a wry weepie: the tale of a super-hot couple – top chef Almut (Florence Pugh) and Weetabix executive Tobias (Andrew Garfield) – who find true love, have a perfect baby and live in a rose-covered cottage, foraging for herbs to go with scrambled eggs from their own hens. But they live unhappily ever after, when Almut gets ovarian cancer.
It should be heartbreaking, along the lines of Love Story (1970). But in that film Ali MacGraw was meltingly charming and Erich Segal’s deceptively simple screenplay made for a real tear-jerker. Who can forget ‘What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?’ Or ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’
Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are as lovely-looking as Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. Pugh is an excellent actress and Garfield is a much better actor than O’Neal.
But they’re only brilliant at acting very annoying people. Screenwriter Nick Payne must have thought he was creating whip-smart wits. In fact, they’re humourless when they think they’re funny; dim when they think they’re clever; selfish when they think they’re kind. Just like a lot of people in professional London.
The dialogue is woefully uninspired but, still, it reflects just the sort of thing entitled dimbos say: ‘I’m like, back the f*ck off’; ‘I need to figure this shit the f*ck out.’ In this dreary, low-intellect world, love means always having to say ‘f*ck’ – and thinking you’re edgy and original for saying it.
There’s a secondary plotline. The dying Almut still longs to win an international chef competition – which she must keep secret from Tobias because it compromises her cancer care.
This supposedly life-affirming plotline is depressingly irritating. Cue shots of Almut and her sous-chef applying herbs to bits of fish with tweezers. Cue one of the least romantic lines ever, from Pugh to Garfield, in the early, heady days of their romance – ‘Do you like tapenade?’ – as they go on a long, tedious tour of upmarket delis after their first night of love.
This film doesn’t know what it wants to be. Sometimes it tries to be a romcom, with comic situations that fall awkwardly flat. You can tell that the scene where Almut gives birth in a petrol-station loo is supposed to be funny, thanks to the two salt-of-the-earth shop workers who end up – wow! – having to act as midwives.
But there isn’t a single line in that scene you can actually call funny. While she’s giving birth, Almut declares, ‘There’s a huge f*cking lump between my legs.’ Not funny and not clever.
Romcom masters like Richard Curtis pack every scene with funny lines, and always move the plot along at top speed. Or take Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, out this Valentine’s Day. You can bet that Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth will use all their supreme comic acting ability to squeeze the comedy out of every single situation.
We Live in Time gives the impression of feeling it can smugly rise above the tight strictures of the romcom because it’s about something so tragic. The fact that it’s all so sad doesn’t mean a cancer doctor saying ‘It’s OK not to be OK’ is moving, rather than emetic.
In fact, tragedy requires the same tight tramlines as comedy. It’s not enough to show Florence Pugh vomiting and having a nosebleed to make you feel sorry for her. You must like her in the first place and must long for her to live.
I’m afraid that, just like Oscar Wilde and his reaction to the sentimentality of The Old Curiosity Shop – ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing’ – I was longing for Almut to die. At least that would mean the film’s overlong 148 minutes were about to draw to a close.
What a ghastly smugfest of a non-rom non-com.
