Together Together (2021)

As a big fan of Ed Helms, I was excited to see his latest feature, and Jack and I both liked it a lot. Helms plays Matt, a 40-something straight man who hires Anna, a 20-something surrogate (Patti Harrison) to have his baby, and it's reliably cringey and funny. Tig Notaro, herself no stranger to cringe, has a small part as a counselor, and Nora Dunn and Fred Melamed make appearances as Matt's parents.

Here's how much I like Ed Helms: I own a T-shirt with a picture of him playing the ukulele, in character as Andy Bernard from The Office, with the caption, "Here comes treble!"

Nikole Beckwith directs from her own script, and the awkwardness of the two main characters is endearing. The casting is perfect--I can't imagine anyone else in the main roles. It's not one bit relevant to the plot that Harrison is, in real life, a transgender woman. When her (hilarious) character in the series Shrill defined herself as trans I had had no idea. I think it's pretty great that she has been cast as a pregnant woman in this.

Alex Somers' nice indie score seems to be available only on YouTube, though he has scored many other projects.

Helms was last blogged for Penguins, Beckwith for 3 Generations, and Somers for Honey Boy. After I wrote about Notaro and Melamed in In a World..., she created and starred in her autobiographical comedy series One Mississippi and was in six episodes of Transparent, among others, and he has been busy with a few movies and a lot of TV, notably eight episodes of Casual and two of The Morning Show. Nora Dunn's hundreds of credits start with 88 episodes of Saturday Night Live from 1985-1990 (apparently she played a recurring character named Babette! Who knew?) through eight of The Nanny, six of Entourage, four of New Girl, and four of the current series Home Economics.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics are together with us, averaging 91%, while its audiences, at 77, are pulling away just a bit.

This is one of the few releases that did come out first in bricks-and-mortar theatres, but we waited a couple of weeks to rent it at home on iTunes on May 19.