We Live in Time tries to tell a familiar story in a unique way. In its basics, the film is a classic Hollywood weepy about pretty people in love who are hit with devastating turns of fate. It’s no spoiler to reveal there’s sadness awaiting the film’s couple. That’s how the unique way of telling the story comes in. Nick Payne’s screenplay employs a non-linear narrative, slipping back and forth in time with Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and Almut (Florence Pugh). The film has only just begun when it skips to a scene where Almut gets the kind of dire diagnosis that is usually held until the third act. The good and the bad, the joyful and the unbearably sad are all jumbled together, like jigsaw pieces in a well-shook box.

To the degree that We Live in Time works, its almost entirely due to the the goodwill generated by the two leads. Pugh and Garfield are both wildly charismatic on screen, and they have the acting chops to pull off the film’s weightier moments. Pugh is particularly good at giving due attention to every nugget of personality the script allows her: Almut’s headstrong nature, her lingering emotional wounds, her mentoring nature in the workplace, and the combination of sadness and anger that are the natural response to her medical challenges. Although the plot probably covers ten years or more in the lives of these characters, there’s little sense of the added years in either of the portrayals. Still, Pugh and Garfield make the relationship believable and do so in opposition to serious impediments in the script.

The conceit of We Live in Time is presumably meant to emphasize the central relationship in its totality, weaving all its different eras together into one. The approach has the opposite effect. Director John Crowley keeps it clear enough as to when any given scene in situated on the arc of these shared lives, but the film plays as a series of incidents that were shuffled together randomly. It’s further damaging that so many of the sequences of major conflict come across as contrived: a reconciliation at a baby shower, Almut giving birth in frantic circumstances right out of a musty sitcom, and participation in major competition that is implausibly done in secret. Too much of the movie relies on characters not communicating with one another in the most basic way to drive the drama. The filmmakers can tinker with the chronological all they want; it takes more that structural mischief to disguise such sizable flaws.