There aren’t a lot of movies about friendship between men and women. It sounds weird to say that, but it’s true. Men and women in film can fuck. Hell, they can fuck and then be friends, or be friends who consider fucking and decide against it. But just normal, platonic friendships are rare in Hollywood. Seeing real, genuine friendship on screen is warm, even comforting — it’s part of the appeal of something like Magic Mike XXL, for example. Sure, they’re all guys, but they are guys who are re-learning how to care for one another. And it’s part of the appeal of Together Together, Nikole Beckwith’s charming indie dramedy about pregnancy, loneliness, and friendship.
“To my sperm.”
Matt (Ed Helms) wants a child. His longtime girlfriend broke up with him awhile back and he doesn’t have any real romantic prospects on the horizon now. But he’s in his 40s, and he doesn’t want to wait forever. A successful app-developer, he can afford to hire a surrogate to carry his child.
Enter Anna (Patti Harrison). Anna is a twenty-six year old barely scraping by in San Francisco. She applies to be his surrogate and is accepted. For the next nine months, Anna and Matt’s lives are intimately entwined in ways neither of them, two loners dealing with the weight of expectations, saw coming.
“To the donor’s egg.”
If you know Patti Harrison, it’s probably for her comedy. Maybe it’s her darkly hilarious stand-up. Perhaps you followed her loopy Twitter antics. Or you may know her from her sole, memorable sketch on Netflix’s best show, I Think You Should Leave. Harrison is great in all of these, deftly switching between different kinds of comedic personas. But all of them have an edge to them, a dark, sharp energy. Harrison is a cynic’s comic.
What I didn’t anticipate was that she is a truly great dramatic actress as well — and a shockingly earnest one. In Together Together, Harrison anchors the film with a melancholic energy that is sharply at odds with her comedic persona. Of course, comedic actors revealing a sad underbelly is nothing new. Steve Carell has nearly made a career out of it at this point. But they’re typically established talents at that time, not up-and-comers, and even the sad roles typically lean into their comic personas. Adam Sandler’s performances in Uncut Gems and Punch Drunk Love were both phenomenal, but also played off of his simmering rage. Here, Harrison takes a role with seemingly no guile or distance and inhabits it completely. It’s a phenomenal performance from an actress who has never done anything like this.
I don’t want to undersell Ed Helms here either. Helms came to prominence in The Office, and that role has colored his career for me. My memory of Andy was a fairly two-note guy — cloying neediness with an explosive angry streak. The Hangover, We’re the Millers, They Came Together, even his brief Brooklyn Nine-Nine role all played on that basic spectrum. So I was delighted and surprised to see how Nikole Beckwith undermined that persona by letting him play just a genuinely, unreservedly sweet guy. The cloying nature is still there; Matt is definitely overbearing. But there’s no hint of malice or rage. It would be so easy for Matt to tip into dangerous territory, as he’s basically made of red flags, but Helms absolutely nails the tricky balance needed to keep Matt likeable.
“And to your uterus.”
Throughout much of my teens and twenties, I was incredibly lonely. Part of it was that sense of growing up where you’re changing and you’re worried that no one knows you. But a larger, more enduring part was my constant certainty that I was a failure. That I wasn’t smart enough, or good-looking enough. It was a deep and earnest belief that I did not deserve love. That’s not something I see films wrestle with a lot. I get why. It’s not fun to watch. Hell, it’s not even very interesting to watch most of the time. Modulated wrong, it comes off as self-pitying whining from someone who can’t appreciate what they have.
I got over it, eventually. I learned to like myself, to see my own strengths and weaknesses a little more earnestly than I had been. And yeah, I was still lonely, but it was a different kind of loneliness because I was no longer convinced that it would last forever or that I ‘deserved’ it somehow. I had hope. And that, that process of learning to love yourself and others again, is the key to Together Together‘s charms, I think.
Matt is lonely. He even developed an app called Loner. Like Tinder, you swipe on people. There’s no profile, though; you just see their picture. Swipe left, and you never see that person again. Swipe right, and you can look at their picture again whenever you’d like. They’ll never know, and you can never message them. They’re just there, on your phone, a distant, unreachable person who sparked some sort of weird feeling in you. And yet Matt isn’t hopeless or self-loathing. At the start of the film, he’s at the end of his journey: He knows what he wants, and he’s ready to reorient his life to find the genuine, human connections that he needs.
Anna, meanwhile, is at the start of her loneliness. She came from an abusive home situation where she was punished for getting pregnant in high school, and she’s still wrestling with the internalized shame of her years with them. In a very real way, she doesn’t believe that she deserves love. She’s a mess of emotions as she wrestles with the trauma of her abuse, giving up a baby for adoption, and needing the money surrogacy can offer to try to build something better — which of course forces her to relive that early trauma all over again.
What Together Together sees is the way those two different kinds of loneliness can play off each other. Anna’s subtle, internalized despair is captivating, but it would be a drag on its own. Matt’s balls-to-the-wall hopefulness is cloying, but manages to lift everyone around him up. Coming out of loneliness out of is a process of discovery about who you are and what you love, and in the intersection of Matt and Anna’s quiet friendship, I saw that process reflected beautifully.
“Cheers.”
Together Together is a gentle indie dramedy. Indeed, it might be the ur-gentle indie dramedy. Tonally, this is the movie that the mumblecore explosion of the late 2000s kept trying (and largely failing) to make, a sharply observed and sensitive story about lonely people finding one another. But Beckwith’s film is smarter and sweeter than most of those films.
The first time I saw Together Together, I enjoyed it. I thought it was a very good movie I would likely never have cause to watch again. But by chance, I caught it a second time. There, freed from expectations of a romantic melodrama that blessedly never occurred, I realized: This is an almost perfect comfort movie. It’s the kind of movie you can watch when you have the fever and can’t turn on any lights but you want to watch something gentle and sweet. And yeah, it’s the kind of movie you can watch when you’re struggling with depression and need to see a reassurance that you aren’t alone, you have people who can help, and you can come out of it.