Ed Helms stars as a single man in his 40s who hires a young pregnancy surrogate, played by Patti Harrison, to fulfill his desire for fatherhood in Nikole Beckwith’s comedy about changing connections.
One of the highlights of 2020 was Jeremy Hersh The substitute, a superbly staged ethical drama that delves into complex interpersonal, psychological, moral and legal issues arising from a third-party reproduction arrangement that takes unexpected turns. The intimate friendship added further complications to the birth pact in that case, while in that of Nikole Beckwith Together together, the pregnancy agreement is purely transactional. The featherweight comedy is also much more generic, bypassing the shifting boundaries between Ed Helms’ future father and Patti Harrison’s paid replacement, without ever really increasing the emotional risk.
Beckwith returns to Sundance six years after his first film, Stockholm, Pennsylvania. In that gloomy drama about the reconciliation of a kidnapping victim in childhood with his parents, the moving performances of Saoirse Ronan and Cynthia Nixon compensated for a script that skimmed the surface instead of probing the turbulent depths of a crowded setting. The second feature film by the screenwriter-director tries a lighter streak with another unsatisfactory script that offers a bland portrait of platonic love with few new observations.
The most notable thing about Together together is recruiting talent roles whose credentials should be directing them to brighter materials – among them Julio Torres de Los Espookys, Anna Konkle from Pen15, Sufe Bradshaw’s Veep, the brilliant Tig Notaro and the royalty of comedy Nora Dunn and Fred Melamed. The waste of assets here is considerable. Bleecker Street’s greatest hope of gathering an audience is in fans of The office and the Hangover films eager to see Helms in the lead role, although he is the talented trans comedian Harrison (from Hulu’s Strident), which gives the film its minimal advantage, even if it deserves a more distinctive vehicle.
Helms plays Matt, who like at least half of the 40-year-old movie guys looking to move on with their lives is an app designer, this time in San Francisco. After an opening interview that sets the tense tone of the prevailing strangeness comedy, Matt hires Harrison’s first-time surrogate gestational services, Anna, who, like most women in their early 20s with no helm in the movies, works at a cafeteria next to a weird guy. barista (Torres).
Anna has struggled since she got pregnant in high school and gave her son up for adoption, left her family and missed college, which immediately makes her the most intriguing character. Matt is just, well, ordinary, and Helms is so determined to make his main character “cool” that he’s also boring. He’s been experiencing a dry spell since a failed eight-year relationship and seems to think that a baby is the answer to his limbo, for reasons he never articulates.
Divided into three quarters, the plot is initially directed by Anna trying to keep the relationship strictly professional, while Matt insists on getting more and more involved in her life, becoming controlling over her nutrition, her sex life and even trying to force her obstructing it during pregnancy – friendly shoes.
Only in the second trimester does Anna begin to warm up to shake Matt, in a sweet scene where they choose a shade of paint for their home nursery. Beckwith is not content to just observe this change, as she makes Anna discuss it in the substitute group she attends. Matt goes to his own group for first-time parents, and the two have joint sessions with a therapist (Notaro). They also treat their bitter ultrasound technician (Bradshaw) as the arbiter of all their disputes. “I can’t tell if she’s really rude or incredible,” Anna says of Bradshaw’s sublime character in one of the funny lines in the script.
Add the delivery classes conducted by Konkle’s earthly mother, Shayleen (“I love the miracle of birth and it really is a pleasure to be on this journey with you”) and the film seriously overloads in spoken scenes about the surrogate experience without losing time to develop real chemistry among its protagonists. Differences of opinion about whether or not they should know the sex of the baby dissolve in a cute shuttle about how to find a gender-neutral way to refer to it, so they decide on the “lamp”. That kind of soft humor is barely enough, especially since they more or less forget about it until the delivery room.
There is no doubt that a smart comedy to be written about the potentially tangled paths of the relationship between future parents and substitutes (another 2020 indie, Milkwater, while a mixed bag, brought a little more bite), and Together together suggests this potential in some of Anna’s most intimate observations. Watching Harrison’s face as guests crowd around Matt unwrapping presents at the baby shower, and Anna feels that her role of being marginalized is quite moving. Even more is Beckwith’s wise decision to hold the camera to her face throughout the actual delivery.
In the end, however, this is a tasteless effort, with its tinkly piano music and flat visuals, failing to do anything from the San Francisco scene other than an occasional photo of a mountainous street or Castro corner. It is pleasant enough, but lacks vitality to be more than slightly funny as a comedy, as well as the insight to build emotional weight as drama. It is, however, an excellent incentive to check The substitute if you haven’t seen it.
Location: Sundance Film Festival (US Dramatic Competition)
Producers: Wild Idea, Haven Entertainment
Distributor: Bleecker Street
Cast: Ed Helms, Patti Harrison, Tig Notaro, Julio Torres, Anna Konkle, Timm Sharp, Evan Jonigkeit, Rosalind Chao, Sufe Bradshaw, Greta Titelman, Nora Dunn, Fred Melamed
Screenwriter Director: Nikole Beckwith
Producers: Anthony Brandonisio, Tim Headington, Daniela Taplin Lundberg
Executive producers: Lia Buman, Anita Gou, Rebecca Cammarata, Bill Benenson, Toby Louie, Kevin Mann, Chris Boyd, Nikole Beckwith, Daniel Crown
Director of photography: Frank Barrera
Production designer: Ashley Fenton
Costume Designer: Elizabeth Warn
Music: Alex Somers
Publisher: Annette Davey
Cast: Richard Hicks, Leslie Wasserman
Sales: UTA
90 minutes