Love, family & COVID come ‘Together’ as comedy
Are you ready for “Scenes from a Pandemic Marriage”? In Stephen Daldry’s “Together,” Scotsman James McAvoy, aka the big screen’s Dr. Charles Xavier of “X-Men” fame, and Irishwoman Sharon Horgan play two halves of an attractive, unmarried, committed couple, struggling to survive the pandemic in a middle class sort of way along with their extremely withdrawn, cute preteen son Arthur or Artie (Samuel Logan), depending upon who is talking about him. It’s not hard to relate to these unnamed people trying to hold it all together, including their feelings about their relationship and their son.
The film begins when Britain enters its first lockdown in March 2020, and the two, who address the camera directly, tell us how they hate the sight of each other. The man, who sports a man bun, describes the eeriness of a local store “picked clean.”
In fear for her safety, they put the woman’s aged mother into a “care home,” where she contracts the virus and dies alone. Speaking of his partner, the man tells us that he “hates her face.“The woman describes the man as “diarrhea in a pint glass.” The man also tells us that at the moment Artie will only eat aubergines, and in one sequence he cooks them for dinner, dipping the slices in an egg bath. We hear of “fricassees” and mushroom picking and what happened when he ate a bad batch.
He owned a “boutique consultancy” with several employees. She says it had something to do with “computers.” She works for a charity and is much more liberal than he, although no one mentions Boris Johnson or “Brexit” at any length.
Speaking in his native accent, McAvoy seems liberated, and his personal charm and magnetism glow. The same is true of Horgan, whom you may recall from the Amazon relationship sitcom “Catastrophe.” I suppose any 40-ish couple with a child can identify with the pressures and frustrations our heroes experience. But comparisons to Ingmar Bergman’s landmark classic “Scenes from a Marriage” (1974), which was a threehour edited version of a sixpart Swedish TV series, are inevitable. This is especially true since we are about to see a “Scenes from a Marriage” reboot on HBO Max starting Sept. 12 with Jason Isaac and Jessica Chastain.
“Together,” which was scripted by Dennis Kelly of the HBO folk-horror series “The Third Day,” begins when there are just over 400 COVID deaths. Soon, there are 32,000 and then over 121,000. We hear her talk about being able to see her mother for only 15 minutes to say goodbye. By Christmas 2020, he and she are back to having sex, although we see no hanky-panky. Artie appears in the background of several scenes, standing alone by the front door or window. He likes drawing cartoon-ish monsters, and the walls are covered with them, increasingly.
More monsters, zombies perhaps, are just what this film needed. “Together” is too much sitcom and not enough scalding revelation and lockdown freak out. At one point, the woman talks about the thousands “killed by stupidity,” and “Together” dares to be real. But the film ends with the weak admission, “I sort of love you,” and we feel the same ambivalence about “Together.”
(“Together” contains profanity and sexually suggestive language.)