Together (2021)

(On Cable TV, May 2022) I’m not sure how I feel about the inevitable wave of Covid lockdown movies that have started making their way everywhere. On the one hand, it was an extraordinary dramatic experience widely shared– we all have our stories of lockdown and how we (and others) reacted to it, and someone somewhere –possibly with a few years’ worth of hindsight—will eventually figure out how to use this in a way that will resonate. On the other hand, well, it may be too soon yet – we may be out of lockdown, or they may become semi-annual occurrences. We’re all tired of the isolation and not eager to go back to it, even for the time of a film. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it —we’ve lived through so many video-chats, so is there anything more than that to say? It doesn’t help that the lockdown movies we’ve seen so far have often been too basic to be interesting – I did like Lockdown because it used the times as a springboard to an unusual heist film, but Safer at Home was flat-out too dumb to be good. Now here is Together to deliver an earnest, stripped-down, almost documentary look at the acute phase of the lockdown, through the lenses of an unhappily married couple clearly not thrilled to be stuck with each other for a long time. James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan star, the first using his Scottish accent to a degree seldom seen in other roles.   As for the form of the film, much of it plays out as a confessional between the two lead characters and the camera, even if who the camera is supposed to be isn’t too clear, and disintegrates over the course of the film. In terms of content, the film feels like an articulate expression of how most of us felt through the experience – trying to come to grips with this, with the additional burdens of life taking place in trying times (here, the death of a parent in a hospice) and how we related to those unable to lock down safely in order to provide essential services. It’s all earnest, sometimes a bit too much so: as if the film was bringing us back there rather than illuminating what happened. In the end, Together feels like it achieves its objectives in recording the event, but not much more than that – it obviously doesn’t have perspective and can’t quite go beyond the obvious, but perhaps that’s enough for now – anything else will need to time to process.