‘Splitsville’: How to F-ck Up Your Marriage Without Really Trying

It was just supposed to be a nice weekend away, nothing more than a fun jaunt to a friend’s beach house, complete with Seventies soft rock sings-alongs in the car (Kenny Loggins’ “Whenever I Call You ‘Friend'” is a great road-trip jam) and maybe even a quick hand job en route. And naturally, everything devolves into a grisly auto wreck with fatalities.

This is how Splitsville starts, with what’s essentially a test, or possibly a warning. If a paramedic mentioning that a gentleman’s rather large penis is noticeably hanging out of his pants while someone else performs CPR on a dead body does not strike you as laugh-out loud funny, you’ll want to turn back now. The movie is giving you an get-outta-jail-free card right from the start. Maybe you wandered in because you like rom-coms, or really dig Adria Arjona on the poster, and thought, well, this seems harmless. The first five minutes is letting viewers know right away that things are about to get messy, and more than a little filthy, and a wee bit darker than your average indie-cutesy quirkfest.

Anyone who saw The Climb, the 2019 buddy comedy with a black heart made by director Michael Angelo Covino and his co-writer, costar and all-around co-conspirator Kyle Marvin, already has a sense of their mutual, oft-kilter comic sensibility. The duo’s follow-up sticks to a similar overall template: men behaving badly toward each other; then trying to reconcile with each other because, y’know, best friends forever, and I love you, bro; then behaving even worse. They’ve even been generous enough to let their fictional wives in on the action as well. Sure, the female characters come out looking way more mature by comparison — honestly, how could they not?! But the foursome all play key parts in what’s essentially a complicated game of How to Fuck Up Your Marriage Without Really Trying.

It’s technically Ashley (Arjona) who sets things into whirlwind motion. After the whole car-accident debacle, she tells her husband, Carey (Marvin), that she wants a divorce. They’ve only been married a year, but Ashley feels the need to explore. Specifically, she wants to have sex with more than just her spouse. He ends up solo at his friend’s extravagant vacation house, where his longtime bud Paul (Covino) and his wife, Julie (Johnson), offer him comfort. Carey and Paul have the kind of brotherly bond where the latter thinks nothing of getting in the shower with the former and checking his naked body for ticks. Paul and Julie have the kind of marriage that experts on such matters refer to as “open.”

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Once Splitsville introduces the players and gives you a glimpse at the extremely complicated, extremely intermeshed dynamic between both couples — Carey is also the gym teacher who coaches his friends’ son (Simon Webster), a 12-year-old vandal-in-training, at his school — the movie begins heating things up and watching the molecules collide into each other. Without getting too bogged down in details, Carey sleeps with Julie, Paul gets angry despite the “anything goes” attitude toward his nuptials, Carey moves back into his old place even though Ashley is making good on her quest for carnal knowledge, things fall apart, the center cannot hold.

There’s a concept known as “the Lubitsch touch,” which refers to the filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch’s facility for blending sophistication, sexual innuendo, and the slyest wit imaginable in a series of comedies, mostly made for Paramount back in the 1930s. You might call what’s happening in Splitsville an example of “the Covino touch,” which combines pushing the envelope on socially acceptable morality, outrageous physical comedy, male characters that are somehow both sensitive and sensationally boorish, and visual extravagance trotted out to service a good dirty joke. He and Marvin are only two films deep into their double act, but you can clock enough of their collective voice in each to see a pattern emerging. There’s a fight scene that escalates from pathetic to perversely kinetic to some sort of extended, Looney Tunes-style level of ridiculousness. A series of moments in which Carey encounters his ex’s various lovers, then slowly inducts each newly spurned partner into a community of misfits living in the same household, couldn’t be handled with more grace or deftness. That all of this happens in a montage designed to look like a single shot — what film nerds and fans of The Studio know as “a oner” — is simply icing on the economic-storytelling cake.

Or maybe it’s just a flex, designed to make a series of “oh, yeah, we’re willing to go there” vignettes about the messiness of monogamous relationships, many of which feel like they’re plucked from the old vanilla-flavored smut comedies of the 1950s and given a slightly modern spin, feel more complex than they actually are. Splitsville is the sort of variation on an old chestnut that’s divided between being an old-fashioned rom-com that serves as a playground for its cast, and a wonky showcase for its behind–the-camera creators. Covino and Marvin end up winning either way, though its their costars who really push this comedy past the finish line. A romantic lead in Hit Man and a key supporting player in Blink Twice, Arjona excels in letting a certain manic panic creep into her exchanges; she’s got a mean screwball in her pitching arsenal. As for Johnson, the trick has always been finding a role that makes good use of her casual presence and oh-sweetie-I’d-rather-be-anywhere-else delivery, and much like the first half of Materialists, this film knows how to take advantage of her 31 flavors of blasé.

All’s well that ends well, of course, and should you choose to stay past that opening salvo of sex, death and dick jokes, you’ll discover there’s a tenderness lying right beneath the superficial cynicism. You’ll still spend close to two hours wondering whether Splitsville wants you to walk away thinking that you’ve seen something semi-sweet or almost irredeemably sour. The key is recognizing how satisfying things feel when they somehow manage to split the difference.