Mark Reviews Movies: TOGETHER (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 26, 2021

Dennis Kelly's screenplay for Together is torn between telling one specific story—about a couple dealing with their rocky relationship, while stuck together at home—and making that story into something much bigger. The backdrop for the relationship drama, as well as everything else the movie wants to address, is the lockdown in the United Kingdom that began on March 23, 2020, in response to the previously known but, at that point, inescapable health crisis presented by COVID-19.

Obviously, Kelly cannot and, in light of the overwhelming tragedy of this ongoing pandemic, probably should not simply let this particular story be about the problems of a pair of sometimes irritating people, as they try to decide whether their hatred for each other is a good enough reason to end their relationship. They're stuck together, at first, because of the national stay-at-home order, but as we learn, these two have become stuck together in the past for a few reasons, as relatively insignificant as feelings of pity or guilt and as significant as the fact that they have a son together. The poor kid just ignores his parents or hides after overhearing a bit too much. There are times we kind of envy him.

That's kind of the point of Stephen Daldry's movie, which was broadcast on UK television in June of this year and now arrives locally in theaters. These two characters, known only as "He" (James McAvoy) and "She" (Sharon Hogan), are so caught up in their feelings of resentment toward, anger at, and general hatred for each other that it sometimes seems as if nobody and nothing else matter.

By the time the vaccines start rolling out several months after the initial lockdown, a lot about each of them as individuals has changed. Does that greater understanding and sense of humility about the world around them, though, actually have any impact on the survival of their relationship? There's also a more important question: Is there any real reason that we should care whether or not this relationship survives or finally fails?

That second question feels vital, mainly because Kelly and Daldry make a specific and stylistic point of forcing us to think about it. The two-hander story follows He and She, in scenes of differing lengths, at sporadic periods of time during the course of the lockdown. Basically, it begins on that date in March, and the proceeding scenes jump into the characters' lives a couple or several months down the line.

That first scene makes Daldry's approach and technique perfectly clear. This isn't just an observational drama about this couple. It's almost an interactive one—at least in a one-sided way. He and She rarely talk to each other in that introductory scene, because they're so busy explaining their lives, their careers, their relationship, and their feelings about what's happening with the coronavirus directly to us.

Staring straight at the camera, He tells us about the company he owns and runs, and She tells us that she works at a non-profit organization. He leans toward the more conservative end of the political spectrum, convinced that the world is all about competition and winning, and She's the more liberal daughter of an avowed communist—a mother whose situation, living alone and later in a care home, will become a focal point in the near future.

The only reason they're still together is their son Artie (Samuel Logan), who lingers in the background and whose sad face becomes a bit more important as the months pass. Mostly, though, both of them wants us to know how much each one hates the other, and the insults, displays of disgust, and constant arguing make that painfully apparent.

The fourth-wall-breaking gimmick, while further establishing how emotionally and mentally distant He and She are from each other, quickly becomes a strain on the whole affair. Its continuance throughout the movie, even as He and She start to find some common ground in grief and political outrage and the shared surprise in realizing that their hatred for each other is dissipating from the stress (It's a short-lived status, of course), undermines any sense of this characters and this relationship as real in any meaningful way. There is, perhaps, only one scene, after She returns from the hospital, that really allows them to talk directly to each other, without the artifice of the gimmick or the need to have these character bickering and bantering their way through a conversation.

On the other side of this gimmick, though, we do get a couple scenes in which the breaking of the fourth wall serves as sorts of confessionals for McAvoy's character. In them, we see a transformation of the man's philosophy on life and society, and one of them, as he notes how he had an inkling about something disastrous well before the government acted upon it, serves as a smart and intimate critique of specific and general failures regarding the pandemic.

Such moments in Together stick out, because they actually have something to say about this crisis has—and, sadly, hasn't—changed people and society at large. Mostly, though, the drama and the bigger picture feel as emotionally constrained as the characters' physical confinement.

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