Nikole Beckwith

(On Cable TV, January 2020) There is a point in Together Together where I realized that the awkwardness of the opening moments of the film was going to be like that for its entirety. That what I took in as throat-clearing and prologue was, in fact, the main feature. That it was never going to actually begin, because it had already begun. There’s a specific kind of mixture between humour and uneasiness that I don’t find particularly palatable, and writer-director Nikole Beckwith squarely makes this the predominant tone of her film. Scene after scene of people feeling uncomfortable, exchanging awkward dialogue, poking and prodding at an unusual situation by deliberately drawing out everything that’s meant to be off-putting about it. I can recognize that it’s good at what it does: in chronicling the relationship between a single forty-something man and the unusual twentysomething woman acting as a surrogate mother for his child, Together Together upends nearly everything that Hollywood has offered as a portrait of pregnancy. There’s no doubt that the two characters are destined for greater intimacy throughout the entire film, but at the same time the tone of the film makes it clear that a conventionally happy ending is never going to be in the cards. (Indeed, the film just… ends.)  I went through Together Together experiencing the equivalent of a big shrug: I can see how it’s being provocative, but I don’t really care.