When we first meet Carey (Kyle Marvin), Splitsville’s hapless, beleaguered protagonist, an unambitious, middle-school gym teacher, he’s moments away from having an inarguably terrible, no-good, awful day, quite possibly the worst day of his forty-something life. On a weekend drive to his best friend’s beachfront home, Carey’s wife, Ashley (Adria Arjona), bluntly asks for a divorce. Unhappy with the state of her personal life and the direction thereof, Ashley wants out, all the way out. She also confesses that her unhappiness has led to infidelity stretching back months.
That’s more than enough for a distraught Carey — already reeling from witnessing a roadway accident that left a woman dead by the side of the road — to throw his hands literally in the air and flee from the scene of the crime and the brutalizing shock that’s engulfed Carey’s newly shattered heart. Carey, though, doesn’t just run a few hundred feet before turning around and returning to the parked car. He keeps on running. He runs across a field. He runs across (and through) a nearby state park. And when he literally runs out of terrestrial options, he opts for a cold, non-refreshing swim in the Atlantic Ocean.
Carey’s run to daylight — or more explicitly, his friend’s beachfront home —sets the comically absurdist tone for his immediate future, the aforementioned best friend, Paul (co-writer and director Michael Angelo Covino), and Paul’s wife, Julie (Dakota Johnson). Paul’s also incredibly wealthy, a burgeoning real-estate tycoon, and more than slightly inattentive to his relationship with Julie, an artist who specializes in pottery and, on occasion, teaches a class.
Initially supportive of Carey’s newly diminished life, Paul and Julie almost immediately reveal the supposed secret of their marital success: They have an open marriage, albeit one where neither tells the other the who, what, or when involving their extramarital escapades. A reeling Carey understandably responds in disbelief, but when Paul returns to Manhattan, ostensibly to close another real-estate deal, Carey’s vulnerability and Julie’s availability combine into a volatile, if predictable, mix.
From there, Splitsville mutates from a comedy of failed marriage (Carey and Ashley’s) to a comedy of romance (Carey and Julie’s) and ultimately, into a farcical free-for-all that turns on Carey’s cringe-inducing, self-destructive to continue sharing living quarters with his nominal ex, Ashley, not as her husband or lover, but as a roommate witnessing a steady progression of lovers enter and exit Ashley’s life. The more with-it Julie remains on the periphery, flawed and far from perfect, but less flawed and more perfect than the three other supposed adults in her life.
Tonally, Covino and Marvin’s (The Climb) script rarely strays from its comically, cheerfully absurdist approach to its central characters. As selfish as say, Ashley and Paul appear to be, they’re never turned into outright villains. Both are driven by conceptions of the “good life” that necessarily involve egotism and selfishness, but even then, they’re not fully irredeemable, just not the life partners Carey or Julie seem to deserve.
Eventually, even Ashley and Paul stumble toward self-realizations of their own, albeit not always in a fully convincing fashion. The mostly dialogue-driven humor periodically pivots into physical comedy, most memorably in a knockdown, drag-out between Carey and Paul once the latter discovers his wife’s boundary-crossing behavior with his soon-to-be ex-best friend.
Shot without the benefit of stunt doubles, the Carey-Paul fight, the physical manifestation of pent-up anger, frustration, and disappointment (among other things), impresses due to Covino and Marvin’s near reckless commitment to the bit and the scene as it unfolds onscreen. Covino and Marvin rehearsed religiously with a stunt choreography for weeks, if not months, before shooting and carefully planned out every punch, kick, and grapple between Carey and Paul, right through a window-crashing finale that was almost as physically risky as it ultimately looked on film.
As the four characters change, grow, and even begin to develop a modicum of self-awareness, Splitsville begins to leave its subversive, transgressive ideas aside, re-embracing traditional, conventional ones in the final moments. If those final moments disappoint, it’s only because of the relative highs story-, character-, and theme-wise, Covino and Marvin consistently deliver in the first and second acts. That’s almost enough to dispel the shedloads of goodwill Splitsville has rightfully earned thanks to everything that precedes the final fadeout.
Splitsville opened theatrically on Friday, August 29th, via Neon.
