Movie Review: Together Will Tear You Apart
There is one secret about the pandemic that no one is talking about but we all know. Most of us, hate the people we once loved. We either realized those friends that swore to stick around in fun times and this apocalyptic era were have seemingly entered…… well….they all left. As for romance partners, turns out being locked in an apartment 24/7 makes things very unromantic. Yet, the sadness of that separation is not just in that you lost their love, but you lost how you loved them. You lost how they made you a funnier, brighter version of you that smiled way more than cried. In Together, James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan begrudgingly confront the ashes of a love that once burned because that love made a kid.
Together 100% lives on the acting of its two, nameless leads: a choice writer and director Dennis Kelly has made and turns them into symbols of how ugly this pandemic has gotten on relationships. The things we once did to escape ourselves and realities were ripped from us, and, without distractions, we felt oddly aware and bombarded by how such things held us down. Thus, on one hand, I feel closer to myself, and, on another hand, I feel farther from the people that I once thought I was closer to than even myself. Notice something?! When you start getting closer to you, it is then you realize how distant some of your tighter bonds have made you from boding with yourself, and McAvoy and Sharon Horgan are fantastic at unpacking this harsh, but needed epiphany. Laced in monologues around the home that break the fourth wall with the audience, Together oddly feels like the fantasy we have all had at being “Malcolm In The Middle” and turning around to an invisible listener to say all that we want to the people we love but never hear us. Hence, at times, Together can get REALLY, HUMANLY dark.
I am not talking about “The Conjuring or Annabelle darkness” as much as “I DETEST THE PERSON I AM WITH” darkness, which, in some ways, might be why we have hauntings. After all, what origin-ghost movie does not start with some relationship going awry and one person screwing over someone they once loved. Thus, there were moments between brutal conversations and soliliquys when I felt fascinated and frustrated by James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan’s characters, which is, actually, good. Whether intentional or not, the film does muster the toxicity of feeling stuck to a person, emotionally, that, by all means, you can physically leave, even in a pandemic. Just move out!
You ever heard someone say, “Well, you don’t have to come?” Usually, that comment is made after you went on your Kanye-level ramble about how you are not in the mood to do something that the other person, who made that statement, invited you to do. In some ways, that little, responsive statement snaps you out of your ego, and low-key belief that the event could not happen without you or, at least, not be as fun. In some ways, Together is a story about realizing life does go on without a person or rather “the event” known as marriage. People grow apart and that longer you are mad about that surprising growth, the more you tear yourself apart along with the separated relationship. Together comes out and can be seen on August 27.
