Here is We Live in Time if we’re more interested in a living room than actual human beings. A gimmick film that only marginally succeeds maybe arguably possibly in the last twenty minutes where we’ve finally spent enough time with one couple to give a damn. Everything else is just remotely viewed noise.

The film is about a piece of land from the age of the dinosaurs to 2024… but mostly the last fifty years when I guess the most interesting stuff happened. It tells its story in one static shot as time shifts around, sometimes before the house was built, more often in that house.

And when I’m more concerned about the size of their tv over the years, there’s a problem. But that’s how the film tells its story… by analyzing the furniture and what’s on tv to figure out when we are. And eventually I stopped trying slice and dice the era since the humans weren’t doing it for me either.

A lot of this movie feels remote because the camera is set so far back from the characters. But also because we don’t really get much good writing for a dozens people who have lived in this house (or where the house will be built). It’s a lot of broad strokes of story, none of them interesting enough to justify the gimmicks.

I was also frowny over the hand-waving inclusion of the bits of story given the Native Americans and the black family. Representation is good, but not when it’s just an afterthought. Not that they are the only ones who get short shrift… apparently we’re meant to care about some families during the American Revolution too. And the invention of the Laz-y Boy chair which, spoiler alert, wasn’t invented by these yahoos.

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright – often digitally de-aged – are the main characters, as such. We follow them more than anyone else and ultimately I started to care a little bit about them. Even if they were broadly written with a telegraphed movie illness. I’m giving the film a low score, but it used to be lower until I finally – FINALLY – found something to give a damn about.

This is a boring, tedious film that doesn’t need the gimmick – any of its multiple gimmicks – to have told a multi-generational story. Just tell a story like a human being and maybe we’d start to care about the human beings in the story. I mostly did not. It’s a bad movie.

Score: 68