Very few breakups are easy, but the breakdown of the relationships between the residents of Splitsville really take the cake.
Writer/director Michael Angelo Covino’s sex comedy follows Carey (Kyle Marvin) and Ashley (Andor’s Adria Arjona) as they work through a sudden divorce in what ought to be the honeymoon period of their marriage, just a year in. He’s extremely family-oriented; she’s less than satisfied in just about every way possible, and it’s this disparity that leads to them calling it quits before we’ve even seen the opening titles.
An interesting ripple comes in the form of Carey’s close friend Paul, played by Covino himself, and his entrancing wife Julie (Dakota Johnson) – a couple with their own ideas on how to live in seemingly perfect married bliss, if Carey’s open to it. Naturally, madness ensues.
’You never really know what something’s worth ‘til you sink it’
Splitsville spends a lot of its runtime as something of a black comedy, handling the multilayered relationships between all four central characters rather mean-spiritedly. They’re a prickly bunch of characters – from Paul’s underlying insecurity that often bubbles up into episodes of physical rage to Ashley’s indecisiveness, which sees her being home a veritable rogues’ gallery of lonely hearts in the hope of finding some genuine excitement – and it’s rather hard to root for any of them.
The film plays up the idea that we all react to breakups and partings in different ways and that a mid-marriage ‘wobble’ can come in many forms, but in leaning into the purely comedic side of that idea, there’s really little time to actually get a handle on who these people are outside of their base needs and broad-stroke character traits. Of the four, Julie manages to stand on her own as a character outside of her role in the ongoing love square (decidedly not a triangle), partly due to some exploration of her bond with her tween-age son and Johnson’s own natural charisma (which earns her top billing among her co-stars).
Covino wants us to feel invested in each of the four main characters and the interplay between each of them – that much becomes clearer and clearer as the film progresses and the script finds its feet somewhat, centralising everyone’s journeys under one roof in the climactic third act. While the film managed to wrangle itself towards a surprisingly quaint ending (contrasting with the chaos that came before), I did find the mayhem of the trials and tribulations that led up to that climax more grating than funny. Your mileage may vary when it comes to comedies such as these that really put their characters and couples through the wringer, but these sorts of movies take a really good balance to work for me.
There’s fun to be had in its opening act and it closes with an ambitious tracking shot that pulls multiple threads together in an enjoyably madcap way, but there’s an awful lot of white noise in the middle. At just over 100 minutes, it’s an entirely standard runtime but it managed to feel a lot longer. To add insult to injury, it’s a film in which the narrative is broken down into separate ‘Articles’, each one shown on-screen as an intertitle. That kind of framing device can really work – each part of The Secret Agent felt justified in its separation – but here, everything merged together in a way that made its five course meal feel bloated and rather tedious. I love a comedy that leaves me laughing and wanting more, but instead of calling for a second helping, by the time the credits rolled here, I was more than ready to split.
BBFC: Rated 15 for very strong language, sexual references, nudity.
Splitsville is in cinemas now.
