Alone Together

Alone Together

Will the movies made during the COVID lockdown one day get a festival or masters theses written about them, or even a night of Turner Classic Movies channel programming in 2072? Will “Malcolm & Marie,” “Together,” “Locked Down,” “Stop and Go” and now Katie Holmes’ “Alone Together” be thought of as a genre worth revisiting? Some of these films do their best to transcend the limitations of a COVID-safe production and say something thoughtful about the situation or tell a story with genuine human resonance. But my feeling is that only Bo Burnham’s one-man show “Inside” will continue to have staying power on this front.

Holmes wrote, directed and stars in “Alone Together,” set in those early days after March 15. The world might be falling apart June (Holmes) is trying to get to an Airbnb rental upstate, but all train travel is canceled due to coronavirus shutdowns, so she has to take a Lyft but she still meets cute. She arrives at the house first to find that it’s already been rented for the month by Charlie (Jim Sturgess), who’s scruffy but cute in his own right. And secondly that John isn’t coming because he thinks he should be with his parents. They both decide they can stay there. And so quickly move from where-do-you-work/what-is-your-favorite-book to eating together, doing karaoke and other bonding activities plus personal revelations about families and relationships.

Holmes has been in so many movies that the traditional structure of storytelling must come second nature to him. Or maybe he simply possesses a strong sense of three act structure. That means, however, that this movie is really predictable. When one character asks another, “How did you find me?” and they respond, “This is where you said you would go,” it’s just a redundant exchange because we heard what was said and knew where the character would be.

What’s wrong with the film isn’t that it’s too traditional; what’s wrong with it is that it doesn’t trust us to understand anything about these people or their lives on our own. We learn early on that Charlie’s job metaphor alert is as a “restorer,” not only of old motorcycle engines but also of everything else in the world, he tells June.

As she’s trying to leave town, June hears a homeless man with COVID yelling that the world is ending and archival audio plays of then Governor Andrew Cuomo talking about unprecedented measures to keep people safe; on top of all that (and still in just the first part of the movie), her Lyft driver tells her that “people think they have all the time in the world … keep putting things off.”

“I’m a vegan. I’m trying to be,” June says when Charlie offers her a Big Mac. But then she’s also a restaurant critic? So ? It seems like an odd choice without further explanation except something-something John wanted to try? And it’s such a shame to waste Holmes’ great chemistry with Luke in “Pieces of April” by giving him such an underwritten part here. The script assumes we’ll feel more for this woman than it gives us reason to.

Luke and all the other actors do their best (especially Zosia Mamet as June’s friend and Melissa Leo as Charlie’s mother), but there’s never enough vivid, specific, consistent character in the dialogue to bring them to life. Finally face to face but still unable to touch each other, Charlie and his mother see one another for the first time in years in a single scene that for a moment lets Leo and Sturgess transcend everything else about this script so we can sense their connection as fellow humans from it and it’s only then that we glimpse what might have been if they’d had another few drafts.

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