Like fellow relationship comedy Oh, Hi! from earlier this summer, the outstanding screwball farce Splitsville opens on a car-confined couple belting out lyrics of soft rock duets to one another. The former features the Parton-Rogers classic “Islands In The Stream” and the latter opts for the Loggins-Nicks hit “Whenever I Call You ‘Friend'” but in both scenes, life seems to be perfect. You’re en route to a weekend getaway and you’re singing cheesy pop songs with your partner; what could go wrong? Oh, Hi! takes a bit longer to unpack that question but Splitsville answers it early and often, with a car wreck and accidental public indecency being just the first of many misfortunes. 14 months into their marriage, Ashley (Adria Arjona) has considered divorce so thoroughly that she’s handwritten a letter she’s finally built up the nerve to read to Carey (Kyle Marvin). Pulled over on the side of the highway, Carey decides to run away as she starts reading it. After all, if he can’t hear her message, then they can’t be over.
After trekking on-foot for some time, Carey finds his way to the beach house of his best friend Paul (Michael Angelo Covino) and his wife Julie (Dakota Johnson). They’re happily married with a son, so surely they must have the answer for how he can keep things going with Ashley. Carey finds the supposed secret of their success is that Paul and Julie are in an open marriage, an agreement with which the two seem comfortable as long as they don’t have to hear details about the other partners or the trysts. Paul gets exponentially less comfortable with the arrangement when Julie chooses to sleep with Carey while he’s at their place trying to forget about Ashley. All the while, Ashley has taken Carey’s running away as tacit permission to take on other lovers and as luck would have it, Carey expresses his desire for their relationship to be open past monogamy.
Written by Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin, and solo-directed by Covino, Splitsville is a hilarious highwire act that feels like it could spiral out of control at any moment but never does. The script is a thing of beauty, packed with consistently clever and sneakily insightful exchanges about the trickiest dynamics of romantic relationships. As Ashley’s suitors stack up, they begin hanging around the house, even after she seems to have lost interest in them. Carey unwittingly ends up befriending some of them, playing video games and listening to records with some of the gentlemen in an increasingly crowded apartment more akin to a himbo harem. He even lends an ear to their romantic woes with his wife, as a clueless chiropractic hopeful laments “it feels like the universe is out of alignment and I’m not able to adjust it.”
Covino corrals an impressive amount of comedic performances from the sprawling cast while concocting bravura sequences you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a swinging indie comedy. A visually dense montage of Carey and Ashley’s home life once the latter takes on the company of other men employs a head-spinning but steadily-paced 360 degree camera motion. A slow-motion dolly shot — one that would feel right at home in Rushmore — across the front of a private school takes its time showing Julie and Carey canoodling in the carpool drop-off before eventually settling on Paul’s dejected face. There’s even a knock-down drag-out fight between Paul and Carey set within the sun-dappled opulence of a Hamptons home that is both sidesplitting in its comical escalation and accomplished in its choreography.
All four members of this quartet, along with single-scene-stealers like Nicholas Braun and Tyrone Benskin, make this material sing but I was particularly impressed with the performances from Kyle Marvin and Adria Arjona. Marvin is a new face to me and following Splitsville, I thought to myself “where’s this guy been?” He has the sadsack puerility of John C. Reilly’s goofier characters and understated sensitivity found in Will Ferrell’s dramatic roles, so perhaps it’s no surprise that we just became best friends. Arjona certainly made her mark with leading roles in three releases last year but this is the best work that I’ve seen from her so far. Playing a young woman contorting her personality manically in an attempt to find herself within the arms of other men, she mines wicked humor from her character’s desperation. In a year alongside other terrific comedies like Friendship and The Naked Gun, Splitsville may be the finest yet.
Score – 4/5
More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is The Conjuring: Last Rites, a supernatural horror sequel starring Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, concluding the saga of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren as they take on one last terrifying case involving mysterious entities they must confront.
Being re-released in theaters is Hamilton, the filmed version of the Broadway smash biographical musical about one of America’s foremost founding fathers and first Secretary of the Treasury.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is Highest 2 Lowest, a crime thriller starring Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright, remaking Akira Kurosawa’s High And Low as a titan music mogul is targeted with a ransom plot and conflicted by a life-or-death moral dilemma.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup