“Don’t you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not.” is the shared delirium, or moral compass, depending on how you view it, between the 2001 masterpiece that is Vanilla Sky and the new romantic dramedy Splitsville, a movie about the freedom and heartbreak that comes with divorce and open relationships.
The sophomore outing from director Michael Angelo Covino, who also stars as one of the lead characters named Paul, Splitsville tracks Paul and his wife Julie (played magnetically by the always superb Dakota Johnson) as they lend support to their best friend Carey (Kyle Marvin) who is going through the immediate fallout of learning his wife Ashley (Adria Arjona doing her best Hit Man 2.0 performance) wants a divorce.
The kicker? Paul and Julie are in an open relationship and, well, Julie sleeps with Carey in an effort to comfort his newly broken heart. What follows is the raw hilarity of adults trying to make sense of complicated decisions and slowly understanding, or better yet, failing to understand, that the world does not revolve around them as individuals. Splitsville brings forth gut-busting sequences and quippy one-liners that are matched with thematically resonant moments of endearing realness.
In an era in which love is often marked as a faintly taboo subject depending on how you define it, the movie sees itself dig through the muck and the grime of what love truly means to ourselves and others, and, more importantly, how that manifests in the decisions one makes regarding someone they supposedly love.
Once the inciting incident–this movie possesses a very clever breakdown presenting each important chapter as a sequence in a legal case–transpires, Ashley, who has been married to Carey for a measly 14 months, realizes that she wants a divorce. In what is easily the funniest opening sequence to a movie so far this year, Carey takes the news about as well as you’d expect him to (running through multiple fields, traversing a swamp, and swimming across a lake without giving it a second thought to get to Paul and Julie’s house for some sort of safety). Ashley quickly starts seeing other people as Carey literally fights off Paul (eyebrows are singed and a fish tank is broken!) for Julie. Displaying its comedic abundance from start to finish with the intertwined nature of the two couples.
Alas, you are presented with the unmovable force of Splitsville–its witty script that never ceases in both laughs and learned moments in which Paul, Julie, Ashley, and Carey are all subsequently trying to identify what they want out of love while their worlds are crumbling around them.
Much more technically proficient than it has any right to be–multiple one-shot scenes that offer a smoothness that offsets the bumpy nature of the narrative at play–and using its full runtime to continue the madness it executes so well, the film, at just over 100 minutes, is at its core a deeply entertaining deconstruction of classic romantic comedy tropes of the last 30 years. While Splitsville does leave room for a deeper dig into some of its characters’ fullness and life choices, it uses its relentless energy to mask what is missing in that department.
It’s not perfect. But neither are the relationships on display, consistently showing themselves full of ill-fated “truths” and an immature comprehension of what it means to love someone else that blossom into many undeniably funny bits–one of them involves Paul bringing a woman that looks identical to his wife to a party; dress, wig, and all.
Carey does indeed utter that iconic line from Vanilla Sky as he is trying to win Julie back during a trip to the fair. Whether he believes it or not is never specified. Hell, whether anybody in Splitsville believes it is up for debate. They probably don’t. But it does go to show the lengths the characters are willing to go to try to enter into a union of sorts with those they love just as well as those they think they love, with more times than not, resulting in laughs so stellar it’ll make you long for a new movie like this every six months.
Here’s to hoping the original rom-com sees a resurrection with Splitsville, a movie more than worthy to start that journey!
Review Courtesy of Ethan Simmie
Feature Image Credit to NEON via IMDb
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