Note: the author of this review has viewed Saam Saam on a digital screener of the house. Before you decide to see it – or any other movie – in a theater, you need to consider the health risks. Here is an interview on the matter with scientific experts.
There’s an ongoing gag about binge-watching Friends in the sweet, friendly, slightly subversive indie comedy Saam Saam. It’s not a knee-jerk reaction, exactly – the film uses a 90s primetime phenomenon that became a shorthand for basic pop culture tastes like an easy way to bridge the generation gap between two people who are getting closer. Intentional or not, the joke mostly just underlines how much writer-director Nikole Beckwith drives sitcom area, while the flat of is even more formal than NBC’s mega-hit. Maybe in the end it’s just an extraordinarily simple way to telegraph something Saam Saam is actually about: It’s a portrait of strictly platonic love – of strangers becoming friends, sometimes while watching Friends.
The main characters are total strangers at the beginning. We meet them while they meet each other. Matt (Ed Helms), an app designer in San Francisco, is 45 and single and wants a baby. Anna (Patti Harrison), the barista he interviews, is 26 and single and is applying for his pregnancy surrogate. Anna had a child when she was still in high school and gave it up for adoption. Many of the women who go through this process have raised a child, Matt notes during their initial conversation. But why would it matter, Anna says politely – if she knows, it’s how to carry a child she will not keep. Either way, as a middle-aged bachelor, Matt does not quite fit into the usual surrogacy profile either. He is alone, while Anna blows out and then self-consciously steps back during their meeting-shrink – a sharply cut opening scene that gives the awkward tone and effectively sets out the dynamics between the two.
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For a while, it was all creepy social discomfort. Early interactions go awry as the nervous Matt appears to be dominant in his monitoring of Anna’s diet and sex life, and the dialogue enters squarely. The office star’s comfort zone of stylized talk and passive aggression. But as these respective singles weaken, the film does: also. Saam Saam is almost a double-edged sword in how often only Matt and Anna are alone in the framework, and renegotiate the boundaries of an intimate relationship and professional, and which is beginning to take the form of something more. They develop a warm relationship, strengthened by the chemistry between two actors that provides the opportunity to immerse themselves CVs. Harrison, a reliable blowline machine on the small screen (her I think you should go sketch is memorable), wedge vulnerability between the cracks of her dry humor. And Helms beats hard on his distinctive, uptight dork routine, to a surprisingly influential (and restrained) effect. They fit nicely, these moonlight comedians.
The relationship never threatens to become a romance. In reality, Saam Saam probably going overboard in the direction of viewers’ concerns about the possibility, with a discussion of age-appropriate dating and Woody Allen. (When the font of the film, cozy cafe backgrounds and an abundance of big-city chitchat vaguely remember the disgraceful filmmaker’s remarkable romantic comedy, Anna’s critique of his classic sounds disappears to assure everyone that Beckwith is no fan). When Matt and Anna finally got the “LIt is a poignant and almost comfortable expression of unloved communion. The film also circumvents expectations in other respects. There is no expositional scene that explains too much why Matt has not found anyone, and why he is ready to start as a single father. And as it eventually becomes clear, the danger of separation anxiety looming over the film has nothing to do with the baby growing inside Anna; it is the probable probability that the expiration date is also an expiration date for the unexpected bond she forged with the father.
It’s ultimately gripping and even a little complicated to this Sundance choice: it’s an ode to the way even transient relationships can be deeply meaningful. Saam Saam only wobbles when it creates an unwelcome continuity between its own seriocomic material and the ten seasons of the network cut Matt and Anna through more than three trimesters. The margins of the film are filled with a series of killers’ rich people – Tig Notaro! Fred Melamed! Nora Dunn! Sufe Bradshaw! —And yet everyone seems to be occupying a slightly obscure comic universe and regularly shifting the story down to sitcom comedy and improvisation. It almost feels like the stack of decks, designed to make us yearn for the moments that our hero and heroine simply fall into a scene, without harsh comic backing to distract from their thriving Gen X millennial compatibility . But perhaps this is the essence of how deep, truly life-changing friendships make us feel: If you’re with the one you love platonic, the rest of the world is just in the way.