Daily Times

The new film ” Together Together ” has a great premise: A single, straight man wants to be a father and decides to hire a surrogate to help. It´s fertile territory that has been fairly unexplored in popular art and brings with it a host of built in dramatic and comedic opportunities, especially with someone like Ed Helms leading the cast.

Writer-director Nikole Beckwith (“Stockholm, Pennsylvania”) instead chooses to focus on the relationship between Helms´ character Matt and his surrogate, Anna (Patti Harrison) and it becomes just another semi-quirky, frustratingly surface exploration of two lonely headcases finding comfort in one another. In some ways, it´s a quintessential Sundance film. The baby and the pregnancy become just a screenwriter´s excuse to put these two together. It´s too bad because Helms shows promise stretching in a more dramatic role and Harrison herself is a captivating presence.

Matt is a 40-something app developer living a comfortable life in San Francisco. Anna is in her mid-20s and working at a coffee shop. We´re introduced to them as Matt is interviewing potential surrogates and it´s hardly an instant connection. In fact, it´s a terribly stilted exchange that is made only somewhat funny by the excruciating awkwardness of it all. It´s unclear if there were any other candidates to choose from but Matt for some reason chooses Anna as his gestational surrogate and soon they´re having another stilted conversation at the doctor´s office. She´s pregnant.

It´s not the first pregnancy for Anna. In the interview we find out that she had a baby that she gave up for adoption as a teenager. The experience caused a rift with her family and she spent the next few years drifting and estranged. But she has a plan to get back on track and wants to use the money from the surrogacy to go to get a college degree in Vermont. From the start, Matt and Anna´s relationship seems misguided and unhealthy. Matt starts showing up at her work and apartment bearing gifts like pregnancy tea and supportive clogs. They visit the doctor´s together. They go out to dinner. They choose colors for the baby´s nursery. They even go to couple´s therapy together and, separately, support groups for surrogates and expectant parents using surrogates. He monitors what she eats and how she´s progressing and makes a big deal out of the fact that she´s still dating in the first trimester. It all seems wildly inappropriate and overbearing, especially considering Anna doesn´t even want to know the sex of the baby so she doesn´t get attached. And although she talks about boundaries, soon she´s staying at his house on the regular and binging “Friends” with him.