“Splitsville” Plays Infidelity for Laughs; “A Little Prayer” Shows What’s Really at Stake

In the studiedly rambunctious comedy “Splitsville,” Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin play a pair of homewreckers. The home, a beachside vacation pad with natural-wood siding and floor-to-ceiling windows, belongs to Paul (Covino), a property developer, and his wife, Julie (Dakota Johnson), a ceramic artist. The wrecking begins when Carey (Marvin), Paul’s best friend, ill-advisedly sleeps with Julie—and then, more ill-advisedly still, confesses it to Paul the next day. Paul and Julie have an open marriage; their relationship is as modern as their taste in architecture, and Carey, guileless to a fault, assumes that his friend won’t mind. Instead, Paul reacts with a fury that all but blasts the roof off: walls are bashed in, furniture collapses, a window goes bye-bye, and some innocent goldfish lose their aquarium. The men don’t get out unscathed, either. At one point, Paul improvises a blowtorch and singes Carey’s face, leaving his peepers hairless. Who says the eyebrow and the lowbrow don’t mix?

The tensions recede, sort of, but the effects of Julie and Carey’s mistake ripple out in all directions. Julie, blessed with Johnson’s cool reserve, has no qualms; this is the first time she’s cashed in on her extramarital benefits, whereas Paul has been sleeping with other women for years—or so she thinks. Carey, for his part, is inspired to give his own failing marriage another chance. His wife, Ashley (Adria Arjona), has spent their fourteen months of marriage flagrantly cheating on him. Divorce seems an easy option, since they have no kids and no money—he’s a gym teacher, she’s a life coach—in tidy contrast to Paul and Julie, who have a mischievous young son and their (once) beautiful home. What unites all four is a willingness to experiment: before long, Carey and Ashley have tabled their divorce and opened up their marriage. The payoff is a drolly whirligig centerpiece sequence in which their small apartment is suddenly swarming with Ashley’s boyfriends. The joke is that the guys stick around not for Ashley, with whom things invariably fizzle, but for Carey, the friendliest, most understanding of cuckolds.

Marvin has the likable-sad-sack thing down cold. He’s tall and goofily handsome, and his air of genial oafishness pairs well with Covino’s more sardonic, misanthropic vibes. They’re like the angel and the devil, respectively, on a Judd Apatow protagonist’s shoulders. The two actors are also best friends in real life, and “Splitsville” is their second ode to manly misbehavior; the first was “The Climb,” a scrappier, nastier affair, from 2020. (Covino directed both movies, each time working from a script that he and Marvin co-wrote.) It’s no surprise that they’ve recycled some of the ingredients here, or that the results, with a higher-budget gloss, taste both slicker and staler. Like the earlier film, “Splitsville” spoons out big lumps of bromantic aggression and self-pity, sprinkles in a few whiplash-inducing emotional reversals, and then pours the whole funny-sad mixture into a cutesy multi-chapter mold, complete with onscreen titles. (Each chapter here is called an “article,” in an arch nod to the film’s nonbinding marital contracts.)

Every scene in “The Climb” took the form of a sinuous, meticulously choreographed long take, and although Covino has relaxed his approach here, he hasn’t lost his sense of spatial coherence. When Paul and Carey smack each other around, the cleanness of the compositions amplifies the messiness of the fisticuffs; the sequence becomes a formalist man-child melee—a dad-bod “John Wick.” Given that so many mainstream comedies nowadays are shot with murky indifference, it’s easy to appreciate even the slightest hint of a visual sensibility. Perhaps too easy: Covino’s technique, for all its finesse, has a mechanistic quality that soon turns deadening. The movie is less a screwball comedy than a screwball contraption—a madcap farce that the screenwriters have reduced to a math problem. New romantic alignments and realignments are introduced, exhaustingly, by the minute; every action spurs a symmetrical reaction, and every gag in the first half finds an inevitable callback in the second. As Paul and Carey’s friendship ebbs and flows, the question of what Julie and Ashley could possibly be getting out of this strained nonsense recedes ever more damningly into the background.

Johnson, a romantic heroine who always seems to be silently deconstructing the idea of romance, is poised enough to emerge unscathed. If you want to see her in a movie that grants her some agency, there’s always “Materialists.” Arjona, the breakout discovery of last year’s excellent “Hit Man,” has a rougher time of it. Her Ashley is the movie’s fourth and fifth wheel, dismissed as both a perfidious troublemaker and a New Age airhead—a life coach in need of a wife coach. “Splitsville,” I think, wants both to satirize the anything-goes absurdity of modern romance and to show us how little we know what we really want from life and love. But it adds up to not much more than a four-way shrug of indifference: nothing here really matters, the movie itself least of all.

Like “Splitsville,” “A Little Prayer” involves a spot of adultery. Mercifully, the similarities end there. This sombre, delicately observed drama, from the director and screenwriter Angus MacLachlan, follows an unassuming woman in her thirties, Tammy (Jane Levy), who lives in a pleasant suburb of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She and her husband, David (Will Pullen), live in a small house on property owned by David’s parents, Bill (David Strathairn) and Venida (Celia Weston), who have become so close to Tammy that they regard her as their own flesh and blood. Bill’s fondness for his daughter-in-law is especially apparent. We can see how in synch they are simply from the way they sit at breakfast—both entranced, not for the first time, by the sound of a woman’s voice, somewhere in the neighborhood, crooning a morning spiritual. Venida finds the singing obnoxious, but for Bill and Tammy it’s humbly transcendent—one of the little prayers of the title, a private entreaty turned public offering. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

MacLachlan, a playwright and a Winston-Salem native who has directed two earlier features (“Goodbye to All That” and “Abundant Acreage Available”), clearly knows something about the illuminative, enveloping power of religious music. There is a deeply reverberant scene in his screenplay for Phil Morrison’s wonderful 2005 film, “Junebug,” which takes place at a church gathering, where a modern-day prodigal son (Alessandro Nivola) leads a small group in an a-cappella performance of the hymn “Softly and Tenderly.” It’s a song of restoration and mercy, a call to submit, with weary gratitude, to Jesus’ love—and also, in this rendition, to the soothing lilt in Nivola’s voice and the quavering harmonies he achieves with his fellow-singers. But the faces of those watching and listening—some grateful, some reproachful, some utterly uncomprehending—tell a more strained and complicated story. In their silent expressions, we glean a history of frayed family bonds and unbridgeable chasms, and, in at least one case, that strange, unsettling phenomenon in which the person you love is revealed to be a stranger.

Although “A Little Prayer” is less tonally ambitious and more modestly scaled than “Junebug,” it is just as quietly perceptive—which is not to say that it’s always quiet. At one point, David’s sister, Patti (Anna Camp), rolls back into town, railing against a ne’er-do-well husband and dragging a clearly traumatized young daughter with her. Patti is as blowsily uninhibited as Tammy is sweetly reserved; she’s a prodigal daughter, and she chafes, understandably, against the unspoken reality that her parents, and even her own child, clearly prefer Tammy’s nurturing presence. Where Tammy proves no more fortunate than Patti is in her choice of husband: David, distant and uncommunicative, is having an affair with his office assistant, Narcedalia (Dascha Polanco). It’s an especially brazen indiscretion, considering that their workplace, a sheet-metal company, is a family business, with David reporting to his own dad. It’s not the only instance of like father, like son. Both men are military veterans, and it’s implied, though never spelled out, that David’s issues—he also has a drinking problem—are rooted in P.T.S.D., from time he spent serving overseas. When David repeatedly rebuffs his father’s warnings (“Straighten up and fly right”), Bill, a bit out of his depth but determined to shield Tammy from pain at any cost, sets out to make things as right as he possibly can.

“A Little Prayer” is spare yet brisk, and it unfolds with a graceful, almost musical sense of modulation: Camp and Weston, both veterans of MacLachlan’s work, strike bracing high notes of acerbic wit, which Strathairn and Levy answer with an understated bass line of emotion. At one point, MacLachlan orchestrates a heart-stopping moment of reckoning for Bill and Tammy, written with a sudden, cathartic directness—a break in their usual language of deferential hesitations—which the actors underplay to perfection. Writing from the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, where the film first screened, the critic Ty Burr rightly invoked Yasujirō Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” (1953), in which a father-in-law and a daughter-in-law—played, respectively, and immortally, by Chishū Ryū and Setsuko Hara—together navigate shoals of grief, both old and new. The comparison is fully earned. No less than Ozu, MacLachlan commits to the conviction that the deepest, truest bonds are not always forged in blood. ♦