Together

source: Together

First of all let me say that I normally like James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan. Sharon Horgan is normally a good comedian so I was looking forward to see what kind of comedy this would be. I read another reviewer stating she cried and laughed during the entire movie, it was that good, so yes I was looking forward to it. But what a disappointment it turned out to be. As if we were already not bombarded enough with the Covid propaganda every day, somebody had the great idea (that's sarcasm by the way) to make a boring movie about it. All you get is a neverending conversation between James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan. Sometimes also a neverending monologue about their stupid opinion of the whole crisis. A complete letdown. I know it's just a movie but at one point I couldn't stand their faces anymore, hopefully this feeling will go away when they appear in another movie. I can't believe anybody enjoyed this stinker. Highly overrated if you ask me. But if you hadn't enough of the Covid propaganda, you know that thing they write 30 articles about per day in every newspaper, that thing you hear non-stop about on the news since two years, then yes you will enjoy this piece of garbage.

Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy acting together, with a screenplay by Dennis Kelly (who worked on the script for Utopia), and directed by Stephen Daldry. What a line-up! I am trying to watch it, but the constant acting to camera, and angrily moaning about the relationship, is wearing. Everything else is excellent - camerawork, sound, lighting, physical direction, costumes, make-up, editing, and everyone else in the team doing a superb job. I just wish the script was less about complaints, and there was no speaking to camera. It is like being harangued.

The dark comedy "Together" chronicles the topsy-turvy year of a COVID-19 locked- down couple, He (James McAvoy) and She (Sharon Horgan), and briefly, their son, Artie (Samuel Logan). We are treated in excruciating closeups to the upended lives of lovers, for whom the claustrophobic life has brought out the meanest and most loving sides of their volatile personalities. She is a righteous liberal running a refugee-aiding agency and He, probably a Tory in disguise heads a boutique tech company. In the first at they can't stand to be with each other. She is occupied with saving her mother from the pandemic by placing her in a care facility (clueless about the fate of that decision!) and he with encounters at the grocery store that stoke his misanthropic anger. As we remember the dialogue treat of Richard Linklater's chatty series with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, main director Stephen Daldry and writer Dennis Kelly also provide their actors with smart dialogue and room to improvise as they attempt to explain the love/hate feelings to their partner. The pandemic is, of course, prominent and tyrannical, but the depth of their feelings leads us to believe that COVID has given them a chance to take a bite out of reality that may have never surfaced in normal times. Consummate actors like McAvoy dine on chances like this, and he doesn't disappoint. Each closeup shows how he uses his face to relay a thousand nuances, mimicking the multiple strands of the virus and the countless sides of human nature. Many times, the actors talk to the camera, violating happily the sacred fourth wall but creating an unusual intimacy with us, the visitors. When McAvoy as He recounts an encounter with a "hero" in Walmart, his varied reactions are magnetizing as you may wonder how an actor can summon up these amazing expressions. We know, however, by the end of this remarkable long take the ambiguities of his character and the tragedy of the pandemic. The third act concludes in Aristotelean balance while it leaves open life to continue its uncertainties, virus or no virus. "Together" shows how we are in this together, and talking it out may be one successful way to overcome the unfairness of life.