‘Splitsville’ Review: Love Hurts in Rom-Com About Open Relationships

The cultural second in which Splitsville, the newest relationship-centric comedy from writer-director Michael Angelo Covino and co-writer Kyle Marvin, arrives is one the place non-monogamy has reached such prominence that New York journal devoted a whole 2024 cowl story to providing a “practical guide” to polyamory. However in model and substance alike, the movie feels extra like a reinvigorated throwback reasonably than a missive from the trenches of recent love. The filmmakers contemporize the screwball comedy by specializing in characters who get actually unfastened with their screwing round—and all have a ball in the method.

Following their 2020 breakout The Climb, real-life buddies Covino and Marvin as soon as once more lean into their off-screen camaraderie to carry specificity and spunk to their on-screen counterparts. Buddies Paul (Covino) and Carey (Marvin) share many experiences, together with, because the title Splitsville signifies, their respective marriages every encountering some main turbulence.

Carey begins Splitsville on the receiving finish of a break-up along with his spouse, Ashley (Adria Arjona), on a street journey to Paul’s seaside home. And shortly after the dissolution of his marital bond, Carey inadvertently instigates one other divorce when he sleeps with Paul’s spouse, Julie (Dakota Johnson). Regardless of his and Julie’s admission that their marriage is open, Paul reacts to this improvement as if he’s been cuckolded. His is a stunning show of jealousy that prompts an expertly choreographed comedic brawl for the ages between the 2 males—an prolonged centerpiece that units the remainder of Splitsville’s plot in movement.

This authentic sin between the perfect buds reveals the movie’s core concern with delineating the totally different dimensions of relationships. Paul and Julie could consider their union can nourish their emotional and non secular connection with out satisfying their bodily wants, however they neglect the evident actuality that marriage additionally accommodates different parts that decide its sturdiness. Any official partnership carries each social and authorized weight, the latter of which Splitsville mockingly underscores with chapter headings bearing the names of frequent divorce clauses.

The movie spins out from the struggle’s fallout, with the 4 central characters taking assorted lovers. The filmmakers render every improvement by channeling all kinds of comedic approaches, which vary from the visible virtuosity of mid-century French and Italian comedies to the verbal zest of American masters like Nichols and Might. Behind the digicam, Covino possesses an equal dexterity with composing a joke in the body as he does in guiding a performer to ship humor by way of a hilarious one-liner.

Splitsville proves that The Climb was no fluke. Covino pushes his directorial verve even additional right here with out counting on his debut function’s built-in single-shot gambit. His self-discipline and persistence are nonetheless readily obvious in this sophomore outing, regardless that the movie depends much less on adhering to an aesthetic asceticism. As a substitute, Covino extra naturally integrates gags into the scenes and lets their unfolding joys information the modifying towards a looser rhythm.

Splitsville thrives on the unpredictability of this formal freedom earlier than settling again into a well-recognized Hollywood narrative components: the comedy of remarriage. The journey that every of the characters seeks outdoors their marriage finally turns into one thing they’re solely capable of finding in the pursuit of their jilted former lover. As a result of Covino and Marvin’s screenplay provides essentially the most airtime to their hapless male characters bungling their approach again towards their ex-wives, Johnson and Arjona should preserve the movie grounded in the extra critical stakes of spouse-swapping. It’s doubly spectacular that they need to accomplish that whereas additionally making their character arcs cohesive regardless of many emotional pivot factors occurring off display.

Although they stay in the current, the place attitudes towards constancy are extra lax, the characters right here all discover themselves circling the identical tensions that powered lots of the Golden Age studio rom-coms. Hopeless romantics like Carey and Julie attempt to reconcile the social and the sexual inside the bounds of their marriages. In the meantime, the extra free-wheeling Paul and Ashley uncover that the strictures of a relationship needn’t inhibit the spontaneity of romance.

Principally steering away from judgment calls or grand statements in favor of observational comedy, Covino and Marvin provide an instructive lesson on the pressure of (human) nature that’s marriage. The establishment represents an try to harness equal and reverse reactions, corralling the unruliness of the guts and the messiness of the libido into one thing resembling order. Sustaining a stability of various views and proclivities is the important thing to purposeful coupling. It’s one thing that Covino and Marvin sharply present by way of Splitsville, itself a wedding of influences and inclinations that dissolves what would possibly in any other case current as inner divisions.