90 min | R | April 23, 2021 | Bleecker Street
A fortysomething man hires a twentysomething surrogate to carry the baby he is having alone. What he wants is not a baby. It is someone who has to stay.
Matt is a single man in his forties who wants a child and has no partner. He hires Anna, a guarded barista in her twenties, to carry that child as a gestational surrogate. The arrangement starts as a transaction. The film is about what grows inside the transaction. The story circles a closeness that everyone around Matt and Anna tries to define and that the two of them refuse to name. Together Together asks whether intimacy needs a category to be real.
Patti Harrison plays Anna with a flat, watchful reserve that does most of the film’s work. She builds a wall around Anna and then lets small cracks show without ever announcing them. Ed Helms plays Matt with a needy warmth that the film keeps puncturing. He wants connection so badly that he crowds the woman carrying his child, and Helms lets that hunger curdle into something close to suffocating. Tig Notaro plays the counselor Madeline with a deadpan that deflates every sentimental beat Matt reaches for. Harrison and Helms never push the chemistry toward romance, and that restraint is the performance.
Nikole Beckwith writes and directs with a clean, symmetrical eye that keeps Matt and Anna apart inside the frame. She stages their talks across kitchen counters and waiting-room chairs, holding the physical gap between them even as the emotional one closes. Beckwith splits the film into chapters marked by trimester, and that structure turns the pregnancy into a clock the relationship runs against. The palette stays soft and domestic, all pale walls and muted daylight, so nothing competes with the faces. The score keeps to gentle, unhurried piano that refuses to push the scenes toward melodrama. Beckwith trusts her actors to sit still and lets silence carry the weight.
The discipline that makes Together Together likable also keeps it small. Beckwith sets up real friction about boundaries and ownership and then lets most of it dissolve before it can boil. The conflict arrives late and resolves easily, and the film mistakes gentleness for resolution. What remains is a warm, watchful two-hander about two lonely people who find each other in the strangest possible arrangement. It earns its quiet without ever fully earning its stakes. That is enough to like and not quite enough to love.