Boomers have The Big Chill. Gen X has Reality Bites (sorry!). And Millenials have… uh…
Well, Emerald Fennell’s Millennial nostalgia-core thriller Saltburn went out of its way to feature a Superbad DVD—and that’s certainly in the running. But for every Superbad, Step Brothers, or 40-Year-Old Virgin in the great TV cabinet of the Millennial unconscious, there’s another kind of movie… A softer, gentler kind of movie. A Juno. A Garden State. A Bottle Rocket.
Now, finally, somebody has synthesised the yin and yang of Millennial cinema. The dick jokes AND the indie pop ennui, together at last. It’s Splitsville, the sophomore feature from director Michael Angelo Covino and his co-writer Kyle Marvin—the final form of the Millennial movie.
Billed as an “unromantic comedy”, Splitsville follows two couples—easy-going potter Julie (Dakota Johnson), her obnoxious finance bro husband Paul (Michael Angelo Covino), his best friend, the schlubby gym teacher Carey (Kyle Marvin), and his free spirit life coach wife Ashley (Adria Arjona).
Paul is a head strong jerk whose business is collapsing, along with his open marriage with Julie. Carey is meek, neurotic and he has a huge dick (every character mentions this and we see it like… three times), but despite all this, his wife wants a divorce. Julie and Ashley? Well, the movie is more of a bromance at heart.
With an episodic structure, we follow Paul and Carey across a year or two as their marriages collapse, new relationships unfold, and their lives become entangled and re-entangled in ever more complicated ways. This is punctuated by some truly dedicated and well-choreographed physical comedy set pieces, including a fist fight that felt solidly five minutes long and draws at least as much from Jackass as from John Wick.
And that’s really the Superbad of it all. The lads are here! They’re kind of pathetic, miserable, and rude, but they’re also sort of lovably sweet and tender at heart. Their failure in love is our gain in laughs as we get to see them ruin a magician’s day, or set something on fire, or cry in the shower.
Truly, even the most pure and high minded viewer will be delighted by what happens when Carey tries to take a dozen goldfish on a roller coaster.
A lot of the more Garden State energy comes from the film’s cinematography. Shot on 35mm and DP’d by Adam Newport-Berra, Splitsville looks beautiful and rich and controlled. When Carey runs kilometres to Paul’s house through forest and farmland, we only see a second of each shot, but every one is beautifully framed and looks like a million dollars. There are also a handful of much more flashy and impressive shots, including a long rotating shot in an apartment that presumably cost a million dollars.
If you were confused as to why a raunchy American slapslick comedy was a hit at Cannes this year, well first of all, the French LOVE slapstick, keep up—but also, Splitsville just LOOKS like a Cannes hit. It looks moody and thoughtful and really worked on.
Unfortunately, the rest of the film’s more thoughtful elements—its lingering dramatic moments, its midlife pathos, its neatly circular story arc—are undercut by its dedication to broad bro comedy. The female characters are terribly underwritten, but even with so little to go on it’s hard to believe when Ashley tells Carey how lovely and sweet and great he is. Really? Him?
While certainly beautiful, creative, intelligent women fall madly, pointlessly in love with pathetic, childish men every day—it’s just not particularly satisfying theatrically.
Look—when Natalie Portman passed Zach Braff those headphones in 2004, you kind of did believe that The Shins would change his life! The fact that Ashley and Carey met at a Fray concert is admittedly really really funny, but it’s a hard thing to leverage for emotional impact when you need it.
While Splitsville is more laugh-out-loud funny than the other big contender for final form of the Millennial movie—Everything Everywhere All At Once—it doesn’t land its emotional moments like EEAO does, leaving it ultimately feeling a little disappointing and overlong for what it actually has to say.
But surely somewhere out there, some mad freak has always wanted to see Judd Apatow remake The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. They’ve desperately wanted the guys from Super Troopers to be in The Squid and the Whale. This pervert wanted Wes Anderson to step up and direct his own take on Dodgeball. Well, freak—I hope you enjoyed the bit with the goldfish and the rollercoaster as much as I did.
