‘Splitsville’ understands the ridiculousness of romance

I’ve been dating a mentalist, and he’s always reading my mind.”

Is that a one-liner or is that a metaphor for a bad lover who doesn’t understand boundaries? When it comes to relationships—and the way we talk about our exes—it’s hard to tell where the punchline starts and who the joke is on. You may say it depends on who’s telling the joke, but that’s much too straightforward. It’s as important, if not more, to consider why the joke is being told, to whom, and at what volume. Mercifully, the jokes fly so cleverly and at such rat-a-tat pace in the film Splitsville (now streaming on Amazon Prime) that they land on everybody involved.

Written by and starring Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin, and directed by Covino, Splitsville is a superb farce that understands not only the ridiculousness of romance but also the helplessness of the besotted. One married couple is suddenly breaking up; another couple (who have money and a child) are in an open marriage. These couples appear to be chalk and cheese, except—as this insightful comedy reminds us—you can write cheesy things with chalk. Both couples entangle and unentangle in fantastical and unexpected ways, all feeling vaguely realistic and, somehow, alarmingly relatable.

When Ashley (Adria Arjona) tells her husband Carey (Marvin) that she wants to end their marriage, he can’t help but quote from her own podcast in defence of their relationship. When Paul (Covino) says his wife Julie (Dakota Johnson) is “a lot more flexible with the physical” aspect of their open marriage, she smirks and says, “I do pilates.” It’s the kind of stuff Woody Allen and Albert Brooks and Peter Bogdanovich would approve of, and the gags never slow down. Neither do these characters as they heedlessly, headlessly pursue love. Or something like it.

I’m intentionally not describing the actual plot because its machinations and contrivances are too beautifully absurd and whimsical—in that “the heart wants what it wants” way and also in that “damn that damn heart” way—and Splitsville, while showing off comedic virtuosity in both verbal and physical ways, manages also to conjure up bittersweet empathy for its flawed and fumbling characters.

Carey, a big man in big sweaters, is all heart but uses lines from other sources (including the movie Vanilla Sky) to underline his own emotional grandstanding. Marvin plays him with a shaggy-dog charm reminiscent of Jason Segel, and he’s perfectly contrasted with his old friend Paul, visibly wealthier and more worldly. Paul is both manipulative and transparent, and Covino plays him perfectly dry. There is a scene where these men fight and it is smashing, all trampled goldfish and burned eyebrows, a work of masterful comic choreography where Paul reverses a piledriver in order to punch Carey in the face.

Johnson is wonderful as Julie—making up for her woodenness in the abysmal, superficial film Materialists—as she deals with substantial material about the nature of romance and relationships. Her character is the saner, more reasonable one of the four, and it is through her conversations and reactions that Splitsville explores and playfully questions modern-day marriage.

Arjona’s Ashley is the freest of the spirits, a woman who pinballs her way from lover to lover without having any kind of a type, which brings us to the film’s most cunning metaphor: that of her husband befriending all her exes, collecting them and keeping them around, never letting her live down her momentary lapses of reason.

The writing is the real star. When a character hitches a ride from the man who has just repossessed her car, we can hear him talk about the many wives who’ve left him over the years, but who still qualify as good women. A little boy names his goldfish after the different Popes. There’s a wealth of detail in these asides, and none of the lines or characters feel throwaway. Covino and Marvin have genuinely populated Splitsville with silly stumbling romantics and shown us how each of them—or, indeed, each of us—could be fascinating to those watching from a (safe) distance.

When Julie tells Paul she is crying happy tears, he—with some justification—says they look just like regular tears. Is that really the problem with love and relationships? That despite all the games people play and the rules they carefully draw up for those games, rules mandated by society or drawn up by polyamorists, that we may be entirely in the dark about what the other person wants. Or what they want now, right this minute. Or which specific tears are happy ones.

The characters in Splitsville would roll their eyes at all this pontification. This is, after all, an uproarious comedy about handjobs and costumed doppelgangers of ex-wives, a film where Nicholas Braun (of Succession) plays a mentalist who hates that he always knows what everyone is thinking, a film where the price of an expensive carpet seemingly goes up by the minute. It’s as absurd as it feels familiar. We don’t need a mind reader to tell us that we are the punchlines. Love makes collateral damage of us all.

Streaming tip of the week:

Samay Raina’s new comedy special Still Alive (YouTube) is powerfully written and performed. He speaks candidly about controversies and censorship, explaining how George Orwell’s “Every joke is a tiny revolution” must be revised in today’s India to “Every revolution is a tiny joke.”

Raja Sen is a critic, screenwriter and columnist. His first play, a murder mystery called The Simla Affair, recently opened in Delhi. He is currently writing a horror film.