Pick 'n' mix: "We Live in Time"

They still sometimes try and make 'em like they used to, just not with the same rigorous level of script editing. We Live in Time is an old-school romantic drama and terminal illness-based weepie - a latter-day Love Story - but also a vehicle for two of the British film industry's brightest stars; it's a prospective date movie, but also a movie movie, with an only tangential relation to real life in several places. The playwright Nick Payne - who broke through with 2015's Constellations before turning a somewhat erratic hand to screenwriting (The Sense of an Ending, The Last Letter from Your Lover) - has been paired with the generally reliable director John Crowley (Intermission, Boy A, Brooklyn) to unpick a relationship we see being played out in multiple tenses at once. Their film opens with a fixed point: thirtysomething couple Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and Almut (Florence Pugh) sitting in a doctor's office, where the latter is informed her ovarian cancer has returned. A decision is taken: rather than submit to further, punishing rounds of chemo (with no guarantee of a positive outcome), Almut chooses to live to the best of her abilities for as long as she still has available. At this juncture, We Live in Time fragments: the story of how this couple got here - complete with ultra-contrived meet cute - is set, sometimes arbitrarily, alongside the story of how this extra time plays out, a process that sees these kids venture into childrearing and, in the Michelin-starred Almut's case, into high-level competitive cheffing. Watching on from the cheap seats, we soon realise the whole film is a varyingly finessed contrivance, designed to bring two very likable performers closer together - and close enough for the rest of us to feel something by proxy.

It's not just at a structural level that We Live in Time presents as a grab bag. What we're watching is 70% movie hogwash, 20% nice human moments and 10% hogwash that makes for nice movie moments; that ratio even persists at a cellular level, within individual scenes. It might be enough to justify a night out in this first, broadly unpromising week of the New Year - we do, after all, live in very real, very specific time - but to take the longer view for a moment, I was never wholly persuaded what atomising this story, blowing it up and asking us to reassemble its pieces mentally, really achieves, beyond perhaps keeping bland Working Title-like chronology at bay. Certainly, any cause-and-effect goes up in smoke, gets vaporous: first Almut refuses chemo, then she's on it, and the couple's child proves even more incidental to the action than the kid in Challengers. (The point may be that life is arbitrary and random, but it's also hard not to think that certain screenwriters just aren't interested in the dramatic possibilities of parenting.) A second later, though, something sputters or flickers into near-life; it's a sporadically working title. Credit Crowley with getting the best out of his actors once more. His leads here keep this perilously whitebread couple interesting and sympathetic, and at least try to the keep the action real, although I must confess a lot of the film's credibility vanished for me the instant Almut was revealed as not just a lauded chef but a former international ice skater. (And some people claim the movies are still in touch with reality.) Crowley's previous films never shied away from melodrama, but it was generally a means of accessing material that felt emotionally vivid and true. Here he's visibly encouraging viewer indulgence. Garfield polishes off Jaffa Cakes in the bath; a pregnant Pugh expresses a craving for Tunnock's tea cakes; at a low point, a doctor passes round the Celebrations. The film itself proves as artificial as peanut brittle; even this viewer, proud owner of Britain's sweetest tooth, emerged far from fully sated, but maybe that's what results when creatives hand you a bag of promising ingredients and invite you to assemble the full meal yourself. (You start snacking on whatever's to hand.) We Live in Time is almost commendably bold in this abdication of editorial responsibility; the trouble is it's no more moving or stirring than the first five minutes of any Ready, Steady, Cook.

We Live in Time is now playing in cinemas nationwide.