Dakota Johnson has starred in two movies this year that could each be described as an “unromantic comedy”: Celine Song’s cynically money- and status-minded Materialists and now Michael Angelo Covino’s neo-screwball farce Splitsville. But only Splitsville has been explicitly marketed that way. Materialists softens its initial punch by eventually getting disappointingly sentimental. More comprehensively earning the pessimistic tagline, Splitsville is impressively committed to making monogamy-related messes cursed to only get messier — more pervaded with world-shattering pain played for bleak laughs.
In Splitsville, Johnson injects, as she often does, her character with the appealing insouciance that also marks her public persona. She plays Julie, a Kintsugi-practicing ceramicist whose hands-first art is made financially tenable by her husband, Paul (Covino). He’s a loaded real-estate developer with whom she and their son live in a lakeside, wood-sided, and huge-window-covered mansion with a limitless stylish-furniture budget. (There’s some unease, early on, when a red-wine spill soaks long enough to become permanent on a $20,000 — or was it $25,000? — living-room rug.)
Paul and Julie are one of the couples that center the Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)-like Splitsville. The other is Carey and Ashley (Kyle Marvin, who co-wrote the movie with Covino, and Adria Arjona), best friends of Paul and Julie whose one year of marriage has only confirmed to Ashley that she feels suffocated by the monogamous, house-and-a-baby-aiming restraints of their rather normie union. In the film’s comedically dark, absurd opening — during which, while returning from a trip, an attempt at road head to spice things up inadvertently causes another driver to fatally crash — she asks for a divorce.
When Carey goes over to Julie and Paul’s house for shoulders to cry on, his mind is blown when he learns that the “secret” to their seemingly invincible marriage is that it’s open, each person free to step out on the other with no questions asked unless questions start to unbearably gnaw. But the outward harmoniousness of the arrangement is thrown into disarray when Carey, who’s staying with the two until he finds a new place of his own to live, and Julie sleep together. Her and Paul’s marital openness — as well as, we’ll learn, the money-swathed “ease” of their lives — turns out not to be so sturdy. When Paul finds out, he battles it out, house-wide, with Carey. In the process, the fellow emotional idiots destroy walls and tables and a giant fish tank — whose swimming residents temporarily move the men to pause the commotion so that they can be saved via a hastily filled bathtub — like they were guys-in-a-comedy analogs to Beatrix Kiddo and Vernita Green in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003). (It’s probably the best fight I’ve seen in a movie all year, just as much of a physical-comedy feat as, unexpectedly, one of action.)
The brawl sets the stage for the rest of the joke- and comic set piece-lavish Splitsville, which is gratuitously divided into drolly named chapters: Termination Event, Disclosure of Facts, et cetera. The vagaries of the heart-created pains keep mounting; Ashley and Carey decide to themselves try out an open marriage, though Carey intentionally ruins it by befriending the assembly line of beefcakes his adventure-hungry wife beds. The fight is also a showy encapsulation of how the movie values choreography as much as finely tuned dialogue. Covino prizes symmetrical, elegant visual compositions that italicize the emotional and narrative chaos they contain; some climactic anarchy at a birthday party is an achievement in several-moving-parts scene-setting. Not so much making a case for monogamy or polyamory as it is that long-term commitment is simply and inevitably challenging, the marital bedlam of Splitsville is marginally made less efficient because it struggles to decide where to end: a few times I’d think it was over before being proven wrong. But the exceeding rarity of smart comedies of its caliber only makes me, as if it were a fluffy dessert with a surprising aftertaste, want more like it.
Austin Butler in Caught Stealing. Courtesy of Sony Pictures; Splitsville photo courtesy of NEON.
It took me three times to go see Caught Stealing. There weren’t any dramatic reasons for my couple of cancelled attempts — I’d just overestimated how much energy I’d have for a late-night showing — but now that I finally followed through I wonder if the universe had been trying to tell me something. The crime thriller has been sold in advertisements as friskier and more fun than the known-for-being-dark-and-depressing Darren Aronofsky’s other movies — his body of work includes 2000’s Requiem for a Dream, 2008’s The Wrestler, and 2010’s Black Swan — and though it is frisker and very slightly more fun than his previous projects, the director’s gravitation toward the dark and depressing grievously undermines whatever attempts at being a good time it makes. Its cruel streak summons an image, to paraphrase Andrea Long Chu in her 2022 review of a Hanya Yanagihara novel, of Aronofsky seated above his ant-size characters with a magnifying glass, burning them until they sizzle with the sunlight streaming in through the lens.
The cruelty that most damages the 1998-, Lower East Side-set Caught Stealing is its needlessly violent treatment of Zoë Kravitz’s character, Yvonne, who is the girlfriend of the protagonist, Hank. Hank lives an anonymous existence as a bartender; he’s always boozed up to blur the pains of his past. (He still manages, though, to have a personal trainer’s Roman-statue physique despite finishing bottles of beer before making breakfast.) In high school, he was en route to what seemed like a sure-thing baseball career before some drunk driving killed both his friend in the passenger seat (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) and whatever prospects he’d at that point had.
Ever-patient Yvonne gets caught in the crossfire when Hank makes the mistake of barely agreeing to catsit for Russ (Matt Smith), the cartoonishly mohawked punk rocker next door, while he supposedly heads off to London to grieve his late father. Russ is, it immediately transpires, wanted by some goons for some long-to-explain money- and drug-related reasons. Since Hank has a cordial-enough relationship with Russ, they decide he’ll give them what they’re looking for. Their first big show of seriousness is not an introductory beating so severe that Hank wets himself and then has to get a kidney removed, but what happens with Yvonne.
The narrative choice’s yeah-we-went-there awfulness feels progressively more unnecessary. With its colorful assortment of characters — the oi-oi-oi caricaturing of the Cockney Russ, a duo of Hasidic siblings (Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber) who’re actually ruthless underworld figures who still make a point to visit their doting bubbe (Carol Kane), a crooked cop (Regina King) who at length waxes rhapsodic about a much-dreamed-of Cancún retirement and the wonders of a well-made black-and-white cookie — Caught Stealing suggests it wants to be a stressful and gritty, but darkly and quirkily funny, caper à la the Safdie brothers. (The latter’s movies, like Caught Stealing, take a page from the seedy style of crime thriller one typically associates with the 1970s, just slicker with flop sweat.)
The dutiful carrying around of the astoundingly well-behaved — and thankfully never killed — Maine Coon Hank has been tasked with sitting further underpins a sense that there was a behind-the-camera desire for the audience to have some fun with Caught Stealing. An animal sidekick is built-in levity. (The film’s screenplay was written by Charlie Huston, the author of the book on which the film is based.) But it feels next to impossible to enjoy the movie, the explosions of brutal violence rendering most of its humor nauseating. Aronofsky’s giddily unpleasant projects are great at ruining one’s day or evening; Caught Stealing is such a letdown because it might not have been if he’d exercised some self-control — reexamined his long-running eagerness to rub our faces in the ugliness life can wreak.
Peterson Reviews 