We open on an interview.
Matt (Ed Helms), 45 and single, is the San Francisco-based developer of an app dubbed Loner, which allows users to amass photos of random strangers: much the way kids used to collect baseball cards. It proved enormously popular (and, honestly, I can see that happening in real life), and made Matt financially secure. Now he wants a family.
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| Matt (Ed Helms) and Anna (Patti Harrison), having a baby together in a rather unconventional manner — both mindful of each other's feelings — struggle to find common emotional ground. |
And not the, ah, usual way. No, with his sperm, a donor egg and a gestational surrogate.
Anna (Patti Harrison), 26 and single, is a coffee shop barista, and a loner by nature. She fields Matt’s eccentric and somewhat invasive questions reasonably well, and finds his sweet-natured excitement at the prospect of fatherhood rather endearing.
They decide to make a go of it.
Writer/director Nikole Beckwith’s Together Together — available via Amazon Prime and other streaming outlets — takes us through the subsequent nine months, with distinct emotional chapters divided by trimester. To a degree, the Matt & Anna dynamic evolves the way we’d expect: initially wary and uncertain, with an increasing chance of thaw and bonding.
On the other hand, Beckwith isn’t that obvious. The relationship actually moves in some surprising — and unexpectedly poignant — directions, primarily because these two people have absolutely nothing in common, and therefore no easy path to comfortable familiarity.
Helms, still channeling the well-meaning nebbish he perfected on television’s The Office, makes Matt the ultimate obsessive/compulsive micro-manager. Once he and Anna metaphorically shake hands, he makes her sign a contract the size of a congressional bill … and, even at that, he overlooks a detail that later haunts him (in an amusing way).
It’s tempting to view Matt as a control freak, just this side of a stalker — surprising Anna at work with a thermos of pregnancy tea, turning up at her apartment at inopportune moments — but we know he’s harmless, and that his heart is in the right place.
She knows, as well. We quickly admire her benevolence, and forgiving nature.
Harrison makes Anna plain-spoken, mildly earthy, unafraid of setting boundaries … and insistent that Matt respect them. Her candor often catches him off-guard; Beckwith’s dialogue frequently is intimately and sexually explicit to a degree that’s both hilarious and cringe-worthy. We chuckle and wince simultaneously.
