An open marriage turns out to be more closed than its participants thought when a third wheel screws himself on to their conjoined chassis in this refreshingly sophisticated sex comedy. With gleefully heavy-handed metaphor, the plot is kicked into gear by a literal car crash that brings two couples together and flings their combined marital problems all over the highway.
First we meet Carey (Kyle Marvin) and Ashley (Adria Arjona), whose incompatibility is indicated not so much with hints as full-on ad campaigns. He’s a massive dork who drops dad jokes like confetti; she’s an out-of-his-league hottie with commitment issues. This may seem like the set-up to an outrageous farce that plays over a weekend, but it’s actually the beginning of a much more interesting story.
Beneath the opening credits, Carey embarks on a brief odyssey to his happy-couple friends Julie (Dakota Johnson) and Paul (Michael Angelo Covino), seeking solace in their apparent security. It’s all shot with gorgeously ironic late-summer light, taking place on America’s dreamlike open road or in a series of spacious, beautifully appointed show homes.
The comedy set pieces are framed in unforgiving wide shots that obviate the need for fast cuts telling you when to laugh. Instead the camera simply hangs back, conciliatory hands in the air, knowing that these people are perfectly capable of making a mess of everything by themselves.
With similar efficiency, when the plot advances in leaps and bounds (as it often does), the director follows it with roaming, circling cameras rather than busy montage. And for a bonus point, in the process of negotiating this maze of intimacy, jealousy and desire, the film reveals the unexpected truth that goldfish are the secret of comedy.
A loose easy-listening score of bouncing drums and cheerful vibraphone offers a light-hearted commentary on this adventure, but it neither punctuates the comic beats nor oversells moments of narrative impact. Like the camera, it’s a wry observer at the edge of the party, whispering amusing aperçus into the audience’s ears.
As well as realising their comic potential, the cast remembers that the humour and the drama will hit harder if they’re playing real people rather than caricatures. Perhaps this is a function of two of them (Marvin and Covino) being co-scriptwriters and one of them the director, but still their labour of love is not an easy one to deliver on.
Kyle Marvin channels Parks And Rec-era Chris Pratt as the hapless and schlubby hero who stumbles into a situation that turns out to be cathartic or even providential. He’s just the right side of annoying, clearly aware that his self-absorption could curdle into self-pity if he doesn’t snap out of it.
Adria Arjona transcends the predictable role of the indulgent missus-without-agency, achieving a successful balance between exasperation and sympathy with charismatic aplomb. It also helps that the unpredictable fractals of the plot give her space to find an emotional lotus position.
As the polygamous pair, Dakota Johnson and Michael Angelo Covino lean so far into smugness that it transmutes into disarming sincerity. In the interests of spoiler avoidance, suffice it to say that their relationship is much more fragile than it first appears, and the entanglements of this central foursome are sometimes breathtakingly funny as well as face-palmingly understandable.
Splitsville stands out in a threadbare and cliché-ridden sub-genre by virtue of its honesty, frankness and open-minded optimism about contemporary sexual mores, a subject that mainstream Hollywood seldom explores with any of those qualities. Its mixture of absurd comedy and incisive social commentary has a very specific voice that might resonate with more of us than we’d care to admit.
-Stew Mott-
