‘TOGETHER’ KEEPS YOU LOCKED IN ON LOCKDOWN
The pandemic has been the setting for several films already — from Doug Liman’s high-profile thriller “Locked Down,” starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, to the low-budget romance “Love in Dangerous Times,” from Houston’s Jon Garcia — and, as the world still wrestles with the virus, we’ll no doubt get many more.
If and when the world can ever look at this era in the rearview mirror, one of the better movies to come out of this particular time and place may be the barbed comedic drama “Together,” a three-person chamber piece from director Stephen Daldry (“Billy Elliot,” “The Hours,” “The Reader”), opening Aug. 27. It is set entirely inside a small British flat as a nameless couple — played by James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan — and their young son, Artie (Samuel Logan), who is barely seen, struggle to deal with a collapsing relationship, the pressures of parenthood and the threat of possible death that the virus represents. “Together” rides the emotional roller-coaster the world has been on over the last 18 months without coming off the rails.
But “Together” is off-putting at first. From the initial moments, set on the first day of the British lockdown in March 2020, the
JAMES MCAVOY AND SHARON HORGAN STAR IN “TOGETHER.”
viewer is thrown into the middle of a lacerating, insult-lobbing argument the couple is having as they drag bags of groceries and unvarnished emotions into the house where they will be forced to stay for who knows how long. McAvoy (“His Dark Materials,” “The Last King of Scotland”) and Horgan (“Military Wives”) constantly break the fourth wall, each facing the camera and trying to get the audience on their side. It’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” wrapped in the paranoia of a pandemic.
If Daldry, working from a script by Dennis Kelly, had kept this level of overwrought — and very stagy — hysteria throughout, “Together” would have been unbearable. But, as the days wear on — interludes are marked simply by dates and the increasing number of British who’ve died from COVID — the tide of rage and resentment rolls out and is replaced by something resembling empathy, understanding and a frustrated resignation.
What really makes it all work though is the acting of McAvoy and Horgan. They can take even Daldry and Kelly’s most heavyhanded moments and the film’s clichéd underlying theme — we’re all in this “Together” — and make them feel real and lived in. And, after everything that the world has been through over the past two years, that’s no small accomplishment.