Patti Harrison’s Star Rises in Charming Surrogacy Dramedy Together Together
Together Together is an amiable, successfully awkward surrogacy dramedy that also has the respectable distinction of being a TERF’s worst nightmare. That’s only one of the tiny aspects of writer/director Nikole Beckwith’s second feature, but the gentle tapestry of intimacy among strangers who, for a short time, desperately need each other certainly benefits from the meta-text of comedian and internet terror Patti Harrison’s multi-layered starring performance. Stuffed with bombastic bit parts from a roster of recent television’s greatest comedic talents and casually incisive dialogue that lays waste to media empires and preconceptions of women’s autonomy alike, the film is an unexpected, welcome antidote to emotional isolation and toxic masculinity that meanders in and out of life lessons at a pleasingly inefficient clip. That the tale of fatherhood and friendship is told through the sparkling chemistry of a rising trans star and her entrenched, anxious straight man (an endearing Ed Helms) only adds to Together Together’s slight magic.
Harrison plays Anna, a young surrogate whose boundaries and lonely self-regard are perpetually tested by her over-eager aspiring parent Matt (Helms). Matt and Anna’s relationship kicks off with a professionally invasive conversation, as he gamely interviews her on her history, only to discover that she’s lied about one of his prerequisites for his surrogate: She doesn’t have any children of her own, having given her biological son up for adoption as a teenager. By all accounts, the interview seems doomed to fail, but something in Anna’s challenging but honest demeanor (she turns the tables on Matt, asking him to name the worst thing he’s ever done) works. We don’t get to see the rest of the interview, but it’s no loss—Matt and Anna talk about everything throughout the course of the film.
Matt is a forty-something app designer whose most recent success, a platonic swiping service for the lonely that wouldn’t be out of place in Her, has given him the monetary ability to go for what he has always wanted: Parenthood. He’s practically bursting at the seams every time he even thinks about his bundle-of-joy to be, yet no one in his life shares his surety that not only is this his destiny, it’s the most thrilling fate known to man. This is where his relationship to Anna evolves into something more complicated than a service exchange. While she’s at first put off by his skyrocketing eyebrows and encroaching concern about her diet, shoes and sex life, and he fumbles with even the most basic of human interactions, their interests in each other’s choice to go it alone leads to a mutual appreciation and openness that they don’t find with anyone else. After Anna sees how much care and weight Matt puts into picking the exact shade for his kid’s future nursery, underlined by Alex Somers’ warmly hopeful score, her walls come down just enough to consider helping him through more than the most crucial functions of the gestational stage.
In a turn from her previous absurd, cosmically evil stand-up and television personae, Harrison’s guarded Anna is often thrust into awkward situations not entirely of her own devising. Everyone around her laser focuses on her only insofar as she affects them or their perception of themselves. She jaunts from doctor’s appointment, to unorthodox couple’s therapy, to crib shopping, to baby shower as a particularly observant fly on the wall, and people (including Matt) seem surprised when their automatic judgements of her are met with an inquisitive or mildly hostile response. These confrontations are the nexus of several of the film’s high points: Harrison’s consistently surprising acting choices, Beckwith’s delight in writing the pointed counters one might avoid in polite conversation and a steady stream of magnetic characters with maybe five lines apiece.