Click here for the flashback interview with Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin for THE CLIMB.
SPLITSVILLE is a visceral film. It evokes not just laughter but the sort of gasps that are more rightly the province of horror films, and this is where its true genius lives. While exploring the ridiculous lengths to which people will go for true love by daring to expose the emotional horror that the struggle entails. Don’t get me wrong. This is a very funny film, but it’s also a very, very smart one that has chosen, as some of its characters do towards the end, to deal in brutal honesty.
We begin with middle-class Ashley (Adria Arjona) and Carey (co-writer Kyle Marvin) who are en route to a weekend in the country with his affluent best friend, Paul (director and co-writer Michael Angelo Covino) a real-estate developer who has hit it big, his potter wife, Julie (Dakota Johnson), and their impish yet introspective pre-teen son, Russ (Simon Webster). They are the picture of marital contentment until a bit of canoodling while driving leads to a disaster and, essentially, the end of Carey’s marriage as he knew it.
Recovering without Ashley at Paul and Julie’s architecturally stunning beach house, he discovers that Paul’s solid marriage has a few quirks, including being open, which leads to a rebound reaction from Carey that riotously demonstrates the primal connection between sex and violence. As for Carey’s marriage, his pining for Ashely, and his newly opened eyes and mind, leads him to propose a similar arrangement to her, the which she cautiously accepts. Her enthusiastic follow-through, however, is daunting, but Carey, a true believer in love conquering on, accepts with an equanimity that Ashley finds unnerving.
What ensues is a frank and erudite dialectic on sex, money, ego, and where true love fits into them all. Spoiler alert: a baseball bat will be employed. The tone is droll, with a wit so dry that it crackles, yet the emotional maelstrom as lovers flit hither, yon, and everywhere in between maintains the stuff of tragedy. The emotional stakes remain high as good intentions and unintended consequences compete viciously with one another in situations that become absurd in isolation, but somehow reasonable in context.
Melding comedy and tragedy so expertly is not an easy trick, but no one in this assured cast misses a step or a beat. Every word, every situation is a double-edge sword, from Carey leaping from his car before Ashely can finish telling him why she’s leaving him and running non-stop the rest of the way to that ci-mentioned beach house, to Paul’s palpable delusion about being a self-proclaimed fully realized person, to Julie’s sly intelligence when dealing with the tender male egos she confronts, to Ashley’s impatience with how lovers cling to her and Carey’s endless acceptance of them. Marvin’s sweetness is more than just innate, it’s eternally hopeful, almost aspirational, while Covino has a stellar gift for bringing a counter-intuitive gravitas to a character who is completely oblivious. His deadpan juxtaposed with Marvin’s earnestness makes for one of the screen’s great comic duos.
People get hurt as the action plays out, not to mention innocent fish who get in the way of one character’s high dudgeon and righteous indignation. There are moments that will make you cringe, but the narrative payoff is worth it. By celebrating the ci-mentioned absurdity of love and, its attendant, closely entwined, pain and ecstasy, Marvin and Covino have redefined what a genre picture can. Something elevated, challenging, and outrageously entertaining.
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