It’s no spoiler to say that We Live in Time is a tearjerker. It begins with the late-stage cancer diagnosis of its female lead, Almut (Florence Pugh), a rising star chef. The story then leaps back and forth through time to paint a picture of her relationship with Tobias, a cereal marketing executive (Andrew Garfield): the charming meet-cute (a car crash), their early courtship, the birth of their daughter in a service station loo. At the London premiere, one woman near me cried so much as the credits rolled that she felt compelled to apologise to everyone in the vicinity.
“I think that’s a shame,” says Garfield. “That someone would feel that they had to apologise. I think that speaks to a cultural thing that we have, particularly in the UK, where outward expressions of emotion are deemed somehow inappropriate or shameful.
“One of the things I love about this film is that it wears its heart on its sleeve. It honours the expressed emotional life of two people that could be any of us. I love that this woman had a huge response.”
I am meeting Garfield in a London hotel room a few days before Christmas. Outside, tourists and last-minute shoppers file through the narrow streets of Soho. He lounges back on a sofa in jeans and a sweatshirt – unguarded and jokey. Next to him is the director, John Crowley, in a shirt and blazer. He leans forward intently. A pot of tea sits between us.
“It does hit a section of our audience very hard,” says Crowley. “They bring their own life experience and sadness to it.” He looks to Garfield. “Maybe it’s just embarrassment, that much naked emotion in a group. I’ve had people say to me: ‘I can’t wait to watch it again on my own and have an ugly cry.’ It’s quite touching.”
More even than the story, or the shuffled timeframe, it is the two central performances that give We Live in Time such visceral cut-through. Garfield and Pugh are sufficiently engaging and relatable that mundane activities such as strolling through a London park, visiting a fairground or sharing Jaffa Cakes in the bath are riveting. When Tobias is in the throes of grief, Garfield is utterly convincing.Five years ago, when he was filming The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and shortly before he went into production for Tick, Tick … Boom!, Garfield’s mother, Lynn, died from cancer. The pair had a notably close relationship – Lynn handmade her son a Spider-Man costume out of felt when he was three, 25 years before he would don the official suit, and it was she who encouraged him towards acting when he was having a tough time at school. Shooting We Live in Time was, he says, “very healing … It was like putting form to something that is so impossible to comprehend: a soul going through love and loss.”
At that London premiere, he sat beside his father. “Part of the reason I wanted to do the film was for him, it felt very personal for both of us. It’s what the film’s about: being present and savouring those moments, which are sometimes extraordinary and sometimes tiny.”
Crowley, who has been watching Garfield speak, jumps in to praise the “startling directness of Andrew’s relationship with his grief”. That directness was particularly in evident in his recent, widely praised appearance on Sesame Street; speaking to Elmo about grief, his eyes pricked with tears. “Of all the pieces you’ve done about this film, that was my favourite,” Crowley tells him.
In a crowded field that includes Paul Mescal, Adam Brody and Harris Dickinson, Garfield is the reigning king of dreamy memes, still the official “internet’s boyfriend”. Fans, increasingly weary of expressions of machismo, have been drawn to his thoughtful reflections on life and fame. He represents a new type of leading man who isn’t afraid to be sensitive.
Are such eloquent expressions of emotion intentional, or simply something he can’t help but say? “It’s both,” he says, starting to laugh. “I can definitely help it but I don’t want to. I remember being young and reading actor and musician profiles or watching interviews, and yearning for something real to happen, yearning to feel seen, yearning to feel like I wasn’t alone in my own inadequacies, insecurities, anxieties and difficulties.
“That plays in my own imagination when I need to be a ‘public person’. I want to offer something that is genuine, that I would find of service to myself as a young or middle-aged person, something to actually connect to.”
As if to prove it, he asks if he can read part of a poem about the power of crying: An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow by Les Murray. It is set amid the hustle and bustle of 1960s Sydney, he explains, which momentarily grinds to a halt due to the presence of a man weeping in a main square.
The man we surround, the man no one approaches
simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
not like a child, not like the wind, like a man
and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even
sob very loudly – yet the dignity of his weepingholds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him
in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
longing for tears as children for a rainbow.
Garfield finishes and the room is quiet. “Wow,” Crowley says, looking moved. The men first met on the 2007 drama Boy A, about a young man newly released from prison. Their careers diverged after that – Garfield came to international attention in 2010 with a supporting role in The Social Network, while Crowley went on to make Brooklyn. Casting We Live in Time, the director says he was looking for actors who could be as funny as they were vulnerable. “I wanted to leaven the emotions with comedy. Life is absurd – it is not binary. They say that in Ireland, people always laugh at funerals and cry at weddings. In my experience it’s true. There’s a black humour to certain sad situations.”
In reviews, much has been said about the film’s non-chronological order; some critics think it mutes climactic moments. Scriptwriter Nick Payne is no stranger to this device – he used it in his hit play Constellations, in 2015, which also jumps forward, backwards and sideways through time to watch a couple’s parallel lives unfold. It’s reassuring, I say, to think that time is not linear, that a past, present and future version of you all exist at once. We are all iterations of ourselves in one moment.
“It’s head-frying to think that time might be vertical, not horizontal,” says Crowley.
“Really?” asks Garfield. “I find it soothing. What drags Tobias into Almut’s apartment while a baby shower is happening?” – after the couple fight about her not wanting to have children. “What’s happening, unseen? We had a sweet thought that maybe it’s their unborn daughter that’s pushing him through that door. I love it as an idea. I found it quite inspiring. And if we have the power to imagine it, why not?”
Before we say goodbye, I want to discuss what feels like the film’s nod to classic 90s romantic comedies. One scene of Tobias and Almut riding a carousel horse wouldn’t be out of place in a Nora Ephron or Richard Curtis classic. “I didn’t know I was making a romcom!” Crowley laughs.
Garfield perks up excitedly. “I love a romcom,” he says excitedly. “My mum was a big romcom person. Sleepless in Seattle played a lot in our house. She also loved all Julia Roberts movies.”
So she would have been a fan of this film? “Definitely!” He pauses, as if he has remembered something. “God, it’s awful isn’t it? There’s such a terrible grief in knowing there are so many important moments they are not going to be incarnate with you in. But I feel a soothing reassurance that incarnate is only a small part of the deal. You can bring their spirit into the room. Those we lose always stay with us.”
Source: theguardian.com
