Mark Reviews Movies: ALONE TOGETHER

Alone Together, Vertical Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 21, 2022

We are still reeling from the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic (even as it quietly continues) and the measures taken to reduce fatalities from the disease. The movies are dealing with those matters, too, as productions were restricted and filmmakers wanted to address the feelings of massive human loss, as well as living in safe confinement, through storytelling. Writer/director Katie Holmes tackles a tale about living through the pandemic in Alone Together, which might as well have abandoned the entire angle of a real worldwide disease for as little as it acknowledges and genuinely confronts it and its consequences.

Indeed, the pandemic is mostly an excuse for a gimmicky setup for a romance. We meet June (Holmes), a food critic living in New York City. A silent and hasty montage gives us a sense of the life she will soon leave behind amidst the ensuing uncertainty. She has been dating John (Derek Luke) for about a year when the first signs of the pandemic start to emerge.

He believes a trip out to the country will be safer for both of them as shelter-in-place orders are announced, businesses start to close, and city life in general dwindles to the bare minimum. Let's just briefly acknowledge the irresponsibility of traveling from a guaranteed hotspot for the illness to a place that's less likely to be affected (until the travelers arrive, as we learned), because all of these little details and oversights add to up the broader problems of how this movie handles the pandemic.

John has rented a house near Hudson, and after some troubles with public transportation that give June an unfortunate air of entitlement and absent-mindedness (How easy did she think this would be with the various restrictions, anyway?), she gets a ride-share car to the house. Along the way, John tells June that he plans to stay in the city, since he's worried about his parents' health, and upon arriving at the house, June soon discovers that someone is already staying there.

It's not the owner (whose absence and apparent disinterest in the renters' lengthy stay become suspiciously convenient as time passes). He's Charlie (Jim Sturgess), an auto mechanic and renovator, who also rented the remote house and has no intentions of leaving.

The two butt heads at first, of course. When Charlie hesitantly agrees to let June stay the night and for the foreseeable future after that, they awkwardly keep to themselves and have a couple of uncomfortable moments (such as Charlie using the bathroom across the hall from her bedroom and June later walking in on him when he's naked in said bathroom).

Gradually, June and Charlie start to spend some time together in the same room, sharing meals (A certain fast food chain gets enough screen time, including a couple shots that seem weirdly framed to explicitly include the logo, and dialogue about it that the movie feels like an ad at points) and talking about their lives. June's friend (played by Zosia Mamet) notes how lucky she is to possibly make a friend during all of this.

Obviously, June and Charlie become more than friends as the days and/or weeks pass. June realizes that John not accompanying her to the house is part of a pattern in their relationship, but forget the specific reasoning for that decision, as well as the context of a global pandemic unfolding outside of this pleasant bubble in which June happily finds herself. She and Charlie just get to spend the days in blissful fun—riding bikes and dancing and joking and singing karaoke—and their nights in tasteful bliss of a different sort.

Indeed, apart from some audio of press conferences about what's happening in the city (Even those cease after a bit), June and Charlie are so untouched and unaffected by COVID-19 and its larger effects that it barely registers as an issue in this story. There are a couple of exceptions, of course, such as John's inevitable arrival at the house because of a family death, although that's transparently a contrived rationale for some conflict. The closest the movie comes to dealing with the actual fact of the disease is a brief return to the city, where our main characters are now so caught up in the romantic melodrama that the pandemic comes across as a minor inconvenience within the scope of their relationship problems.

Holmes' impulse to evade reality as much as possible in Alone Together is understandable, of course, since we all know about and have lived with it. It does exist in this story, though, and if COVID-19 is primarily going to be used as a gimmick for an unconvincing romance, maybe it's best to just keep it out of that story entirely.

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