Together: A Crashing Bore Masquerading As A Marital Masterpiece!

Together: A Crashing Bore Masquerading As  A  Marital Masterpiece

Together(Amazon Prime)

Starring   James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan

Directed  by  Stephen  Daldry

Rating: * ½

Together(Amazon Prime) Movie Review: I should have been warned by the  utterly fake fireworks that  Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor threw at one another in  director  Doug Liman’s  lockdown marital  crisis film Locked Down last year.

Some  misguided sense  of optimism propelled  me towards another  slugfest  between  two very talented actors  posing as a  couple on the brink of breakup during the lockdown.

Now, I must  confess I am not a James  McAvoy fan. Although he is  unquestionably skilled at slicing through his  characters’  monstrous run-ins with self-doubt he remains to me, slightly annoying his  sweaty  personality,like the Jamaican stunner Lashana Lynch in No  Time To Die.

You know, that  guy or girl at a party who will come forward and befriend you, tell you jokes you don’t want to hear, fetch  you a drink and insist he/she  is intelligent  enough to  give you company?

That’s McAvoy for you. No matter  how  goodlooking personable  and  articulate  there is something vaguely  irritating about  such people.I  had no  problems at all in buying into his screen-wife’s hurled accusations in Together about the husband (addressed simply as ‘He’) being a pain in the  ass.  In fact as played by the  wonderful  Sharon Horgan( wasn’t she  the life and soul of the series Catastrophe?)   the wife’s pungent perspective stuck home because  McAvoy seems  to be all of  what she says he is.

The  film is less than 90 minutes  in length but seems to go on much longer. Watching a  couple fight during the pandemic  in  the  house nextdoor would  probably make  more sense. You know they are doing it  out of boredom. This  is London during the  pandemic. Extraneous   characters and  noises are shut out as  McAvoy and  Horgan  shout out to one another with  accusations and  insults that have a history which we do not really care to  know.

Even  if we do , their belligerent  bickering is  unintelligible  to the  outsider.  Admittedly  there are passages where the two strong  lead players  lead us into  their characters’ mutual hostility to ferret out that love which bound them together in the past.

Morgan is  specially  persuasive when  she talks about her  mom dying in Covid isolation in  the  hospital. But such episodes where  the hefty hostility is halted , are  rare. For a large part  of  the  slinging march all we get is  impenetrable  sarcasm and  a growing sense of  a doomed  marriage  and a partnership which has gone into remission  during these hard times.

There is  also a specially-abled  child  sauntering around somewhere  in  the  background, not saying a word. How  can he? When his parents are so voluble they sound like roosters  circling each other  during the  mating season.

I remember  a  special child in the brilliant director Stephen Daldry’s  Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Extremely loud, the couple in  Together certainly is. Incredibly close to despair is where they leave us.