Nikole Beckwith’s Together Together explores the relationship between a single father-to-be, Matt (Ed Helms), and his much younger surrogate, Anna (Patti Harrison). While the film often draws on the tropes of the indie romcom, from the initial interview between Matt and Anna playing out as an awkward meet cute, to the pair’s bond intensifying alongside a rising undercurrent of conflict as boundaries are tested, Beckwith never sets her protagonists on a path toward romance. Indeed, theirs is an entirely platonic relationship, as Together Together is more concerned with mining the duo’s respective anxieties and insecurities as a way of illuminating the emotional complications of the surrogacy process.
Despite Matt and Anna’s budding personal connection, Beckwith never loses sight of just how unbalanced the power dynamic is between them. The film stresses the unfair expectations that Matt places on Anna from the get-go, from monitoring her diet to trying to convince her to refrain from sex during the first trimester of her pregnancy. It’s a contract that brought them together and Matt holds most of the cards, including the $15,000 that Anna will be eventually paid. But while the man can be pushy, and occasionally a bit judgmental, Anna finds herself warming up to his bumbling but sincere attempts to ensure the future safety of his child.
A touching scene early on reveals part of what’s led Matt and Anna to both feel like outsiders, and helps to lend credence to a companionship that initially seems far-fetched. When Matt says, “It’s weird to be perceived as hopeless in this moment when I’m actually incredibly hopeful,” it speaks not only to how most of his family, including his parents (a sorely underutilized Nora Dunn and Fred Melamed), see his becoming a single parent as a disappointment, but also to Anna’s lengthy estrangement from her own parents.
The film is best in such scenes, where Beckwith taps into her protagonists’ vulnerabilities and allows their sense of camaraderie to butt up against the tensions caused by the transactional nature of their relationship. Conversely, whenever Beckwith wades too far into cringe humor, be it in the extreme awkwardness of Anna’s co-worker (Julio Torres) at a coffee shop or the exaggerated depiction of a New Age-y birthing prep class, you sense the film’s desperation to temper potentially negative reactions to distressing material with irony and cheap laughs.
But where Together Together’s broader comedic strokes tend to fall flat, Helms and Harrison’s wonderful rapport, especially as their characters grapple with the lines they may be crossing ahead of Anna giving birth, helps to keep the film grounded in the recognizably real. And it’s in its acceptance that Matt and Anna’s friendship likely cannot, for the good of Anna and the child, last beyond the birth that Together Together earns its bittersweet finale, embracing the notion that the impermanence of a bond doesn’t negate either its intensity or lasting impact.
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