Alison Brie and Dave Franco, Indie Power Couple

In virtually any celebrity couple, there exists some degree of perceived power imbalance. Whether or not it actually affects relationships that we can’t know everything about, it’s rare for two famous people to seem like they’re on precisely equal footing. Alison Brie and Dave Franco seem unusually aware of this near-impossibility, and seem unusually willing to make it a focus of their increasingly frequent work together. To this end, there’s scarcely a joke you could make about James Franco’s younger brother clinging to the coattails of his beloved partner that their new movie Together doesn’t already make, or at least imply, itself.  

Maybe that’s not entirely fair to Franco, who might technically have a “bigger” movie career than Brie’s, with roles in both the Neighbors and the Now You See Me franchises. But Brie arguably has the prestige, with long-running parts on beloved TV shows Community and Mad Men, showcasing a dramatic-to-comedic range not always evident on the CV of the younger Franco. Her character-actress side in movies has also yielded supporting roles in The Post and Promising Young Woman. Dave’s biggest awards-buzz movie, meanwhile, was The Disaster Artist, directed by a pre-disgrace James.

In recent years, however, Brie and Franco have been making more movies together. Franco directed himself and Brie in the pandemic-era horror film The Rental, which became a VOD and drive-in hit during the summer of 2020. He followed that up with Somebody I Used to Know, which he co-wrote with Brie, and in which she plays a kind of rom-com FOMO as a woman reconnecting with her ex just before his wedding. Now the IRL married couple circles back to horror with Together, in which they star but not write or direct. In Michael Shanks’ film, Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco), a notably unmarried mid-to-late-thirties couple, decamp to a woodsy small town. Millie has taken a teaching job there, while Tim bristles at the opportunities he may miss by opting out of city life in favor of quiet domesticity. Yet at the same time, Tim depends on Millie; she’s the one with the steady job, the income, and even the driver’s license. Does she rely on him equally, and if so, is that more codependence than love? These questions are brought to the fore when a mysterious force causes the couple to be physically drawn back together, even when they’re wondering if they should permanently split.

Brie and Franco aren’t really famous enough to presume that any audience for Together will be aware of their own history as long-time partners who quietly married some years ago and, like their characters here, do not have children. (Brie and Franco have made the conscious choice; Millie and Tim’s thoughts on the matter are undiscussed, and, as such, murkier.) But for anyone with awareness of them outside their movies, their collective sensibility as a beautiful but artsy, successful but non-superstar pair can’t help but be reflected in Together, which places regular-world tension on their fictional union: Tim is still an aspiring musician at the age of 35, while Millie seems more accepting of a “normal” small-town life as a cheerful teacher.

Using a real-life couple in this scenario is risky, particularly when the movie has so few other characters. Not only does real-life chemistry have a mixed track record for on-screen replication, but having a successful couple pretend to feel stresses over things we intuitively know won’t be major issues for them – in the real Franco/Brie scenario, it’s as if they’re both the musicians, and they’ve had a career full of steady gigs – can underline their difference from us. (In other words, even if Brie and Franco feel codependent, what do they argue about related to their careers? Who gets to work with Steven Spielberg first?) But as Millie and Tim are drawn back to each other, their skin painfully sticking to each other and their entire bodies eventually hurling themselves down the hall against their mind’s will, the movie does a pretty convincing job at depicting the symbiosis of coupledom.

That’s where Franco bravely volunteers to look like the guy bringing a bit less to the party in that department – the one who has to cook dinner, because he can’t earn decent money or even drive a car. (This movie is a real stomach-punch to non-driving spouses, like me.) He essentially embraces his status as someone who one could easily imagine not necessarily pulling equal weight sans his familial connections. (His first movie was Superbad, made by a bunch of his brother’s frequent collaborators.) Brie is playing a character more practical-minded and quasi-normie than how she comes across in interviews and on social media, where she casually conveys her love of nudity. Yet there’s also a trace of acceptance here, that she’s going to be a well-liked working actress, probably not a global superstar.

And that’s exactly what’s appealing about Franco and Brie as a creative partnership: They seem to be using their power-couple status to make indie movies that at least attempt to explore situations and characters often ignored by big-ticket blockbusters, or even just the broad comedies they’re best-known for. Together uses genre trappings to look at the power dynamics of a long-term relationships; The Rental pries its couples apart before subjecting them to slasher horrors; Somebody I Used to Know infuses a rom-com situation with real-world melancholy. It takes trust and security to make these movies, and the Brie/Franco team has reached an unusual level of #couplegoals: They seem unafraid to make themselves look inessential.