The Beguiling Star Power of 'We Live in Time'

Hit me with your car, Florence Pugh.

Aside from its time-jumping structure, We Live in Time is your standard weepie. You have a couple, they fall in love, they have a kid, and the mom gets cancer. Nothing revolutionary plotwise, but a nice movie designed to pull at your heartstrings. However, watching it, I couldn’t help but appreciate the work of leads Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.

As we move further into an IP-dominated landscape, actors have lost the cache they once had as the main marketing tool for a movie. Diminishing their marketing ability has also somewhat diminished audience appreciation for what movie stars have that makes them unique in entertainment. It’s easy to write them off as vain and spoiled because who wouldn’t want to get paid a tidy sum to be attractive and play make-believe. But this cynical view of acting misses what only a handful of people can do and why actors like Pugh and Garfield are essential to the success of an emotionally-driven dramedy like We Live in Time.

Try forging an instant connection with strangers. It’s not easy! Sure, Pugh and Garfield are incredibly attractive, but Hollywood is packed with attractive people. You can be good-looking and be a black hole of personality. It takes a special spark to make audiences find you immediately endearing and certainly to make the leap that this film requires, which is that Garfield’s Tobias would fall for Pugh’s Almut after Almut accidentally hits Tobias with her car. Looks only get you so far, and from there, you need to be empathetic and charming while never coming off as too slick. And it helps that Garfield and Pugh seem to come by these traits naturally. Look how endearing they are!

Watching We Live in Time, it’s not that the film blew me away (although I enjoyed it quite a bit and was left a little teary-eyed afterward), but that when movies load up on CGI, superhero lore, and other trappings of our blockbuster landscape, it’s putting us further away from the actors. That’s not to say that actors are unimportant to IP-driven movies, but they also have to serve a pre-existing property where the audience might have opinions on the characters. Instead of creating a character and winning over the audience, you’re meeting the audience halfway on the adaptation. Again, that’s fine, and it varies on how well the audience knows the source material, but We Live in Time is an example of a straight shot of charisma from two of our best actors.

I’m not advocating that we need to love actors more, but I think it’s worth appreciating what they bring to movies that value them for their unique affability rather than as famous faces that can slot into some IP-driven product where the studio cares more about having them do press rounds than having the audience instantly invest in a story that might make them feel sad.