‘Together Together’: A Dramedy About Surrogacy That’s Light On Tension Or Friction [Sundance Review]

After spending the last 10 months at home watching reruns of “The Office” (at least until the show left Netflix at the end of 2020), the idea of spending even another 90 minutes with Ed Helms probably sounds like a punishment inflicted on the slothful in the Fifth Circle of Hell. Who would want to languish in Andy Bernard’s company even at the best of times, anyway? But over the years, Helms’ movie roles have given him space to explore beyond the limiting boundaries of the type foisted on him by the NBC sitcom, even if those roles are clearly warped around that type: “Cedar Rapids,” for instance, calls on his coltishness while “Jeff, Who Lives at Home” make use of his knack for expressing delusional white male self-aggrandizement.

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Nikole Beckwith’s “Together Together” falls in the middle of the spectrum of Helms’ big-screen career choices; his character, Matt, is successful and financially stable, but he’s nonetheless a loser in the sense that he’s single and recovering from a failed relationship. He’s confident in a vacuum and cumbrous in the world. He’s sweet-hearted but struggles with masculine ignorance amplified by masculine bravado. Put in short, he’s a regular-strength caucasian American dude, save for one detail: He’s going to be a single dad by choice. Having thoroughly vetted his surrogate, Anna (Patti Harrison), through a fittingly ludicrous interview process, Matt walks the road toward parenthood out of lockstep with Anna, whose feelings on her part in Matt’s life, and on kids in general, mostly sum up to ambivalence.

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The movie, and Harrison’s performance, are much more complicated than that surface read, of course, because there’s nothing about creating a child that one can take casually, even if the child isn’t yours. As Anna, Harrison keeps her emotions just under the skin. Where Matt leaves none of his feelings to mystery, Anna prefers a prevailing aloofness that breaks only when directly tested, whether by him, by Madeline (Tig Notaro), their couples counselor, or by the prenatal technician (Sufe Bradshaw) who looks on the unorthodox pair and their idiosyncratic interactions with a mixture of bewilderment and exasperation. (Sonograms of the baby, at least, help break the tension.) 

Of the film’s supporting cast, Bradshaw has the best opportunities for communicating social dubiety over Anna and Matt’s coupling, such as it is, and “Together Together” is at its core a piece about conflict between surrogates and intended parents. But Beckwith is staunchly on the parents’ side and uses America’s cultural child-rearing myths and mores as their comic foil. Surrogacy presents a degree of innate discomfort, of course, and emotional tangles, but those complexities are exacerbated by the outsider’s gaze. Anywhere Anna and Matt go together, they’re assumed to be husband and wife. When their dynamic is clarified, the go-to reaction is shock that a man, and not a woman, has chosen single parenthood. Matt stumbles over assurances to Anna and to strangers that he’s a feminist, a sincere sentiment delivered with the grace of a circus clown faceplanting over a banana peel. 

It’s for this reason that Helms, though quite good here – years from now, we may recognize this as some of his finest work – is arguably miscast. What Matt and Anna go through, together (together) and separately, is prickly enough without the need for supplementary grammar to drive home the point. By contrast, Harrison’s performance, subtle and observant, fits seamlessly into Beckwith’s aesthetic. She functions as her own person as much as the audience anchor. We experience the film’s narrative through her eyes, whether Anna’s alone or with Matt, whose perspective only supersedes Anna’s when they aren’t in the frame together. This is likely a tactical choice rather than an artistic one. A surrogacy film set from a male point of view would do a disservice to the material, because yes, the scenario affects Matt, but it affects him differently. Anna is both removed from and hopelessly attached to the process at the same time. She’s in a unique, and uniquely painful, position, and Beckwith knows it.

But Matt isn’t shortchanged, either. Men like Matt – men who crave fatherhood, let alone shoulder the burden of raising a child solo – are rare. In deference to our era, Matts may be an increasingly common phenomenon as parenting evolves ever further into an egalitarian endeavor instead of a strictly gendered one; it’s okay, says “Together Together,” for a man to care for a child. Helms plays Matt as congenial, earnest, a tad fixated on familial recognition (in keeping with the character Helms is best known for playing, of course), an altogether well-intended doofus with clear-eyed motivations for bringing up baby all by himself. As Matt confides in Anna around the film’s halfway point, he’s somewhere in between his adult friends on the nostalgia scale and simply needs a push to get himself out of the rut he’s dwelled in for years. For most, parenting is just a natural, expected part of marriage. For Matt, it’s a fire lit right under his ass.

The weight of Matt’s journey toward self-determination coupled with Anna’s endlessly knotty journey as an incubator should give “Together Together” unsettled dramatic heft. But for a movie about the inequities inherent in both parent/surrogate relationships and expecting father/expecting mother relationships, the stakes hover surprisingly low in the plot stratosphere. Save for brief discord instigated by Matt’s extremely loose sense of boundaries—once more, the man means well—most of the conflict is interior to Beckwith’s protagonists. To a point, that tracks, but past that point leaves the film somewhat airless and light on friction. The least it can be in exchange is light on its toes, warm, and unfailingly human in its sensitivity and good humor. [C+]

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