In all the consternation over the disappearance of the theatrical comedy, a trend hastened by post-Covid viewing habits that find comedies being largely relegated to the ghetto of streaming, something often missed is how visually uninteresting the smattering of comedies that do play theaters have become. With a handful of notable exceptions — just to head off any protests, assume whichever filmmaker you’d like to defend is huddled under this ever-shrinking umbrella — comedies have become increasingly televisual in nature. Blame lazy audiences trained on the predictable rhythms and flat visuals of sitcoms, a misguided (and budget-conscious) belief that elaborate blocking and evocative cinematography distract from rather than enhance humor, or the explosion of improv-based comedies that all but demand multiple stationary cameras running simultaneously, but increasingly “comedy in film” means shooting actors in static two-shots or alternating close-ups while delivering barbed dialogue.
All of which makes the films of director Michael Angelo Covino such an exciting deviation from the norm. Over the course of his two feature films, both made in conjunction with his creative partner and co-star Kyle Marvin, Covino has demonstrated a foundational interest in film grammar and using the camera to heighten familiar scenarios rather than merely recording them for posterity. It might come across as patronizing to praise the intentionality of a director, but one can always sense that Covino is making actual choices with his films which, when compared with many of his contemporaries, feels like an oasis in the desert.
Covino’s new film, Splitsville, plays at times like a more refined, more expensive version of his first film, The Climb. This latest effort iterates on a similar chapter-based structure, themes of friendship, infidelity, and male fragility, and the commendable belief that movies are meant to move — although, considering the cursed fate of The Climb, perhaps he felt he was entitled to a do-over. In brief, Covino’s little-seen debut premiered out of competition at Cannes in 2019, where it was acquired by Sony Pictures Classics and scheduled for release in March of 2020, just as the world was shutting down. After bouncing around the schedule a handful of times, the film was ultimately given a shrug of a release at the height of the pandemic, where it immediately disappeared into obscurity (by comparison, Splitsville is being given a hearty push by its distributor NEON following its own Cannes premiere and should attract significantly more eyeballs).
Splitsville stars Covino and Marvin as Paul and Carey, respectively, two middle-aged friends punching above their weights in the relationship department. Covino is intense and wiry with receding hair, while Marvin, who has the disposition of a golden retriever, is conventionally schlubby; the former is married to Dakota Johnson’s Julie, and the latter is practically a newlywed to Adria Arjona’s Ashley. Splitsville sets its events in motion with a bang — in more ways than one. While driving to Paul and Julie’s ostentatious vacation home nestled on Long Island Sound for a couples weekend, Carey and Ashley engage in some sexual misadventure while operating a vehicle that possibly leads to another car on the road flipping over, killing one of its passengers. In the immediate aftermath, which finds Ashley desperately performing chest compressions on the dead woman and Carey running around trying to get help while his penis is still hanging out of his shorts (no one will ever accuse these filmmakers of being highbrow), Ashley comes to the realization that life is too short to be unhappy and unburdens herself of her many, many, extramarital affairs to her husband and asks for a divorce while they’re parking on the side of the road. A despondent Carey flees the vehicle and runs the remaining miles to Paul and Julie’s home (Ashley’s already driven there, dropped off his suitcase, and left in the interval), seeking refuge and comfort from his two friends who seem to have the perfect marriage. That’s when Paul and Julie let the heartbroken Carey in on their secret: they have an open relationship and each of them is allowed to sleep with whomever they want without fear of the other one becoming jealous. How evolved of them!
In a development so obvious that it’s practically visible from space, Julie seduces Carey while Paul shuttles off to the city for business. She claims every time Paul’s busy “with work,” it’s actually a euphemism for him having sex with someone and, hey, what’s good for the goose… When Paul returns the next day, a psychologically mended and considerably more relaxed Carey cheerfully divulges to his best friend what happened the night before, expecting him to be cool with it. Needless to say, he is not. After a clumsy and prolonged fight scene that finds the two men suplexing one another into furniture and doing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage — think the fist fight from They Live by way of the abduction sequence from Anora — Julie returns to the wreckage of her house to chasten both men as the children they are.
In the days that follow Paul seethes as his relationship with Julie further deteriorates — it becomes clear that Paul, who loves to casually boast about how expensive his tastes are, may be overleveraged to a criminal degree — while Carey alternates between newfound liberation at having had sex outside the bounds of marriage as well as a burgeoning sense of possessiveness towards Julie, who he’s ready to anoint with the title of girlfriend. And things don’t get less confusing when Carey returns home to the small apartment he shares with Ashley, only to find that she’s rapidly taken on a string of lovers (crossing all ages, races, genders, and socioeconomic statuses). Rather than being upset or moving out so they can both start their lives over, Carey instead announces he’s “good” with all of it and that he’s happy to sleep on the couch while she takes the bedroom for her revolving door of new partners. Eventually, Carey starts making friends with all of Ashley’s flings, turning the abode into a de facto clubhouse-cum-group therapy session for all of her discarded exes (complete with regularly scheduled movie nights and large family-style dinners), which starts to feel a little bit like cuckolding as psychological warfare on his part.
Splitsville wears its references proudly, channeling the bed-hopping European sex farces of the ’70s and ’80s, as well as the just erudite enough to be dangerous to themselves characters found in many a Woody Allen film. At the same time, Splitsville also exists in the long shadow of Judd Apatow, whose films routinely feature (relatively) homely men who couple up with more worldly babes and are forced to confront their immaturity on a ribald journey of self-discovery, only to circle around to a “lower case c” conservative message about the importance of monogamy and the family unit. Like Apatow’s films, Splitsville is aimed squarely at a certain kind of media-savvy viewer who will, for example, recognize Cameron Diaz’s second-most mortifying line of dialogue from Vanilla Sky, or appreciate why an aborted reference to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers is so gasp-worthy in this context (this is also, easily, the most play The Fray has had since the first Obama term).
There’s a bit of a generality to the film’s specificity. Splitsville is especially straight-/white-/male-coded, none of which is really in vogue at the moment, and the central dynamic of performatively progressive characters revealing themselves to be, ultimately, tangled balls of neuroses and insecurities — even Ashley gets in on the fun; having slept with seemingly half the town, she begins to realize that what she wanted was in front of her the whole time and starts to contemplate how she might win Carey back — has a certain well-worn quality to it. Everyone behaves like a fool (except perhaps Johnson’s character, who tends to float above the proceedings while maintaining a sphinxlike smirk throughout, which saves Julie from becoming a wet blanket) and learns a lesson about trust, the limits of freedom, and the simple pleasures of familiarity.
And yet, the filmmaking itself is never less than thrilling, almost as if it’s using the formulaic framework as a springboard to let Covino’s formalism freak flag fly (to appreciate just how stark a contrast can exist, it should be noted that Marvin, who co-wrote and served as a producer on Splitsville, previously directed 2023’s 80 for Brady, which is as joyless and visually functional as this is aesthetically ambitious and light on its feet). Dialing back on some of the “calling card” showboating of The Climb, Covino still treats shot composition, the employment of off-screen space, and the compression of time as intrinsic to the comedy — once upon a time, these sorts of niceties were commonplace; now their mere presence is so uncharacteristic in mainstream cinema that their inclusion here practically shakes you by the shoulders. The film loves to emphasize the play between extreme foreground and background, often having scenes unfold in extreme wide shots where the focus of the scene, typically someone who’s presented as irate, is rendered ineffectual by dint of their size within the frame. As in The Climb, Covino also remains a fan of long, serpentine Steadicam shots that are impressive less for how difficult they appear than how the film is trying to draw your attention from competing interests; orchestrating chaos less as a Herculean stunt of coordination and timing than as a means of conveying how besieged the characters are by the all-encompassing demands of life.
At the same time, Covino and company aren’t above outright “showing off,” as in a sequence which seamlessly stitches together half a dozen camera movements to appear as a continuous roving shot meant to illustrate the passage of time (as well as the accumulation of Ashley’s sexual partners). Further, for the film’s centerpiece fight sequence, the lack of cutaways or insert shots really does wonders in selling the idea that Marvin and Covino are genuinely kicking the shit out of each other. But mostly, it’s just stellar fundamentals at play: devastating edits that bring the house down merely by cutting from a close-up to a medium-wide that jolts the viewer with additional visual information (often in the form of smart set dressing), or the way the film allows the camera to linger on a performer long enough for their scene partner to exit and then re-enter the frame rather than simply relying on traditional coverage. People tend to roll their eyes when you say this is the stuff of classical screwball comedies, but Covino possesses a real talent for directing actors as a waltz with the camera. Coupled with a drum-tight structure that finds the film drawing together its themes in a circular manner — “hand or mouth” takes on a decidedly different meaning by the end of the film — and you have something that feels like a model for how to make a modern comedy. The film then ends on an almost rueful note along the lines of “sometimes you don’t know the value of something until you’ve destroyed it,” which arguably holds true for comedies writ large. We had to let the fields go fallow to appreciate just how rare it is to pull off something as impressive as Splitsville.
DIRECTOR: Michael Angelo Covino; CAST: Dakota Johnson, Adrina Arjona, Kyle Marvin, Michael Angelo Covino, Nicholas Braun; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: August 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
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