If “Sometimes things just don’t work out” is not printed on a poster of Together Togther I will eat my hat, because this is the central theme and pulsing ethos motivating all arcs in Nicole Beckwith’s surrogacy comedy, starring Ed Helms and Patti Harrison.
I’m not entirely sure what the metaphor of this movie is, or if there’s a metaphor? Is it just a situation comedy? Are there a lot of single men entering into surrogacy with a lot of single women? Is the movie just supposed to take the best moments from both of those would-be comedies and splice them together? Wife says the movie has a “Knocked-Up” quality to it: two people who don’t know each other subverting genre expectations. Having never seen Knocked-Up, hearing someone describe the outlines of an almost exact replica of the scenes of this movie was a little dispiriting.
The choice for when to end the movie (split very intentionally by title cards for each trimester) is surprising and interesting. There is a certain bit of will they-won’t they going on until a conversation about the way in which their romance would ape some of the ugliest fantasies of a Woody Allen movie, which is sharp commentary on Woody Allen and also an excellent set up for complicating the movie’s own objectives. Their age gap is insurmountable for romance, but is the movie about platonic friendships? Individuals with boundary issues trying to be respectful?
The movie checks all the boxes of representation: Helms and Harrison make for multi-racial co-leads, the parents they see at their classes are variously gay, lesbian, gender non-conforming, bi-racial. There are the correct number of Tig Notaros. Some of the most interesting patter in their early–courtship?–relationship has to do with the navigation of liberal progressive feminist values and the ethical travails of surrogacy, which, by the way, aren’t really fully explored so much as the emotional life of the surrogate. Much more dramatic and scary are the debates roiling right now in the States about whether or not a surrogate should be paid for their time and whether or not they have legal claim to the child if they should “change their mind,” and under what circumstances.
Together Together at times goes through the motions of a pregnancy comedy while also never venturing too far from observational humor to make positive claims about the emotional experiences of surrogacy. There’s an ambivalence that reigns supreme in Harrison’s performance, and maybe that’s inevitable, since anything more full-throated might come off as callous or inauthentic, whatever that might mean for a character to make a clear decision about her own life. The movie doesn’t contain much of a metaphor to make it feel universal and so it’s maybe a little shallow in its storytelling. Quirky people in an awkward situation, trying to be good one another while also being good to themselves.
