Review: SPLITSVILLE

 by Rob DiCristino

A thoughtful, well-composed, artfully constructed comedy. About boning.

It wasn’t too long into Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville that I started to notice something curious: It looks great. Not just the actors — though Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona are certainly stunning — but the visuals. The composition. The framing. The camera movement. Covino directs the film with an intentionality that, when coupled with Adam Newport-Berra’s lively cinematography, actually uses the camera to support its wry, irreverent comedy. I know! It’s insane, right? In an age of blockbuster filmmaking when we’re never sure if two co-stars ever occupied the same physical space at the same time, Splitsville actually mines comedy through blocking, staging, and — in the case of an uproarious extended brawl that rivals the house-trashing sequence from Anora — action! For years, I’ve been operating on the assumption that Game Night’s John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein are the only modern directors who understand that comedy is more than over-the-shoulder improv. Apparently, I was wrong!

Thinking back on it, Splitsville’s opening sequence perfectly encapsulates this blend of imaginative staging and unique sensibility: Just over a year into their marriage, Carey (Kyle Marvin, who also shares screenplay credit with Covina) and Ashley (Arjona) attempt a little mobile fellatio while driving on the highway. Things go awry — as they always do; don’t try this — but instead of Carey losing control and crashing the car, it’s actually another car that swerves out of control and flips off the road in front of them. The driver is killed immediately, while the passenger lives just long enough for Ashley to watch her die. As they drive away in stunned silence, Ashley admits that she’s been unfaithful and wants a divorce. Despite Carey’s forgiveness and resolution to work on things, Ashley’s made up her mind. What does Carey do? He pulls to the side of the road, gets out, and walks — yes, walks on foot through dangerous topographical obstacles — to the house that his best friend Paul (Covina) shares with his wife, Julie (Johnson).

Later, while Carey licks his wounds — and, in one of Splitsville’s many full-frontal male nude scenes, after Paul thoroughly checks him for ticks — Julie and Paul admit that marriage is a trap and that theirs is an “open” arrangement. Spiritual monogamy is real, they insist, but physical attraction is more of a moving, malleable concept, and their arrangement makes it possible for them to explore the entire spectrum of sexuality while maintaining their core connection. This is all bullshit, of course — don’t ever let anyone convince you it isn’t — but Carey does manage to get Ashley on board: He’ll stand by her while she burns through a host of new lovers as long as she promises not to divorce him. Along the way, he’ll fall for Julie, help fuck boy Fede (David Castadena) with his resume, and discover why no healthy marriage can possibly stay open for very long. Oh, and he’ll show his dick. Like, a lot. And I don’t know if it’s a prosthetic or Marvin is just showing off, but. Damn. I’d be flashing that thing around if I had it, too.

Building off the success of their Cannes darling The Climb, Covino and Marvin present a shaggy but endearing comedy about relationship dynamics that is too busy empathizing with the essential humanity of its characters to ever judge them for their selfish, often repugnant behavior. Other movies might castigate Ashley for abandoning her sweet oaf of a husband so she can go to midnight raves and fuck the phone book, but Splitsville remembers the lessons of David Fincher: People are liars and perverts, and Ashley’s journey of self-discovery will feel familiar to many of us who have found ourselves using self-reinvention as an alternative to meaningful therapy. As Carey, Marvin also gives us a hero whose easy confidence sets him apart from the prototypical rom-com lead: He’s not trying to find himself (he knows exactly who he is) or learn more effusive modes of self-expression (again, his dick is constantly hanging out). He’s just trying to find his place among the liars and perverts — above, under, and inside of them, if at all possible.

Splitsville’s humor is just as confident, trading the “Well, That Just Happened” of every overlit Netflix comedy for more incisive, behavioral laughs. Excellent bits about Lorenzo’s Oil, CVS receipts, and Vanilla Sky are thrown away as casually as Ashley’s lovers, and viewers who insist on watching with subtitles — Viewers Like Me — will find a thousand other gags littered amongst the background dialogue. Even Dakota Johnson is having fun in this one, playing the aloof and spoiled Julie with far more aplomb than whatever scatterbrained, overwrought bullshit she was slinging in that awful Materialists. And while Splitsville never gives legitimate sympathy to open relationships or those who practice them — it barely dignifies them with consideration before diving head-first into their contradictions — its final scene does highlight the unexpected bliss of human weakness, the little joys we discover once we accept the futility of imposing rules, traditions, and structures on something as ineffably wild as romantic love.

Splitsville is available on VOD platforms now.