Review: 'Together Together' is a smart, sly comedy about relationships as a transaction, with a breakout comic performance by Patti Harrison

Writer-director Nikole Beckwith fashions a new genre — the platonic romantic comedy — in “Together Together,” a wry comedy about the transactional nature of relationships.

The relationship at the center of this film is literally transactional: Matt (Ed Helms), a successful middle-aged app designer, hires Anna (Patti Harrison), a 26-year-old barista, to be the gestational surrogate to carry his baby. The $15,000 fee, Anna believes, will allow her to finish the college degree that was derailed when she got pregnant as a teen (she put the baby up for adoption).

Anna aims to live her life as normally as possible, given that her belly is gradually swelling. But Matt can’t help but micromanage, concerned that she eats properly and so on. When Matt tries to surprise Anna at her apartment, and sees a guy leaving, an argument ensues about whether sex during pregnancy is safe. “You know the baby is not in my vagina, right?” Anna asks Matt, as these two people realize they’re thrown together in an incredibly intimate relationship with an expiration date.

Beckwith (whose “Stockholm, Pennsylvania” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015) is clearly influenced by Woody Allen movies — she even uses the same typeface in the credits — while also commenting humorously and pointedly about the male gaze that dominates Allen’s work. Where Allen’s sympathies would have been entirely with Matt, Beckwith levels the playing field by focusing on Anna’s feelings and experience.

Beckwith creates some quietly funny scenes between Helms and Harrison, as they navigate Matt’s involvement in the pregnancy and how close Anna allows herself to get to Matt. The movie’s final shot is a heartbreaker.

Helms is in his wheelhouse as Matt, the nerdy 40-something trying to rein in his enthusiasm and failing. For people who aren’t fans of Harrison’s work in “Shrill” or “Big Mouth” (where she’s a staff writer), this performance is eye-opening, as she navigates the emotional and physical changes of this pregnant pause in Anna’s life.

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‘Together Together’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, April 23, in theaters where open. Rated R for some sexual references and language. Running time: 90 minutes.

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This review first appeared on this site on January 31, 2021, when the movie premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.