SPLITSVILLE (B) - Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin team up again after their refreshing debut "The Climb" and return to the twinned concepts of infidelity and male friendship. This one starts out promising but gets pretty silly by the end.
The pair again co-wrote the script and star together. Covino directs and plays Paul, a rich jerk married to a beautiful woman, Julie (Dakota Johnson), with a precocious little genius son. Paul's best friend, Carey (Marvin), has just been dumped by his wife of one year after she is rattled by a brush with death on a car drive to see Paul and Julie. Distraught, Carey takes advantage of Paul and Julie's proclaimed open marriage and sleeps with Julie. Everyone proceeds to flip out.
Carey's wife, Ashley (Adria Arjona), wants to be sexually adventurous, and Carey eventually returns home and keeps house with her various oddball boyfriends, most of whom quickly become her exes. Carey claims to be embracing Ashley's opening up of their flailing marriage, but he can't shake his feelings for Julie in the wake of their one-off tryst. Meantime, Paul's financial empire threatens to come crashing down, turning their living situation upside down.
This is all played quite broadly, and Covino and Marvin have several plot twists up their sleeves. You cheer for them to pull it off while they stage some truly funny scenes. But the basic premise gnaws at you -- what are these gorgeous, thoughtful women doing with these weird shlubs in the first place and why can't the women quit them? (The excessive male nudity might offer a few hints.) Arjona is full of life, and the film can barely contain her. Johnson commits to the uber-indie project and gives a rounded performance as a wife and mother who yearns for more than just her cushy life.
Covino and Marvin are inventive, and their script seems peppered with improvised moments full of sly observations about relationships, both romantic and platonic. And there is an epic fight between the two men that drags on as they smash through rooms in Paul's house and eventually through a plate-glass window. It is cleverly choreographed for maximum credibility and comedic ordinariness.
It would give too much away to explain how the narrative gymnastics exhaust the capital that is banked in the first half of the movie. Covino and Marvin have a Duplass brothers aesthetic with a Jim Cummings edge, a devotion to a nerd bro code. They are clever and funny. This sophomore effort feels like a bit of a fork in the road. Let's see where they head next.
BONUS TRACKS
The film opens, appropriately, on a '70s vibe, Kenny Loggins and Stevie Nicks' hit "Whenever I Call You Friend":
The closing credits return to the '70s with Steve Forbert's passionate Dylanesque ballad "Romeo's Tune":
Then there is this Polish disco-era curiosity from ORM, "Pasky Z Cívek Odvijim":
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