Film reviews: Splitsville is fast paced, smartly written, and rich in emotional intelligence
Michael Angelo Covino, Kyle Marvin, Adria Arjona and Dakota Johnson in 'Splitsville'. Picture: Universal All Rights Reserved.
★★★★☆
Hollywood doesn’t do screwball comedy anymore, alas, which means (16s) arrives as a breath of fresh air.
Shocked into a moment of clarity when she witnesses a fatal car crash, Ashley (Adria Arjona) tells her clingy, uxorious husband Carey (Kyle Marvin) that she wants a divorce.
Devastated, Carey abandons their car and runs to the beach-house of his best friends Julie (Dakota Johnson) and Paul (Michael Angelo Covi), who tell him that the secret of their successful marriage is an open relationship.
Horrified at first, but then intrigued, and desperate to save the marriage, Carey tells Ashley she’s free to sleep with whoever she chooses.
But when Carey begins opening up emotionally to Julie, he quickly discovers that Paul’s definition of ‘open’ is a lot narrower than Julie was led to believe.
Written by Michael Angelo Covi and Kyle Marvin, with Covi directing, Splitsville delivers a quirky take on the classic love-triangle.
The plot seems chaotic as the characters lurch from one disaster to another, but it’s all fuelled by a deliciously wry, offbeat sense of humour that’s summed up by a fight scene between Paul and Carey in which both antagonists are hilariously hopeless scrappers.
Marvin is endearing as the befuddled Carey striving for a Zen-like acceptance of his wife’s desire for sexual freedom, while Covi is blackly funny as Paul, whose buttoned-down rationality is a thin veneer for his simmering rage.
Dakota Johnson, meanwhile, is situated in the eye of the storm, radiating an outward calm as Julie is torn apart inside by the conflict swirling about her.
Fast-paced and smartly written, is rich in emotional intelligence: even as the characters snarl and bicker their way through multiple betrayals and regular reconfigurations of their respective relationships, the subtext is a quietly persuasive plea for generosity of spirit.
★★★☆☆
Set in Belfast in December 2004, (15A) is inspired by the infamous £26.5m Northern Bank robbery. Abducted from their homes by an armed gang, their family members taken hostage, bank manager Richard Murray (Eddie Marsan) and his employee Barry McKenna (Éanna Hardwicke) are ordered to loot the bank on the gang’s behalf without arousing the suspicions of the bank’s staff, and especially the eagle-eyed security chief Mags Fulton (Michelle Fairley).
Written by Aisling Corristine and Colin McIvor, with McIvor directing, delivers a wonderfully tense and sweaty first hour.
Neither Barry nor Richard is hero material, just two regular guys who find themselves in an impossible situation as they try to figure out how to empty the vault. Despite the sterling efforts of Éanna Hardwicke and Eddie Marsan, however, the tension slackens in the later stages as the unlikely partnership begins to deliver the goods and the story settles into the grooves that lead to its inevitable conclusion.
★★★★★
(15A) is a hybrid documentary-dramatisation that opens in 1946 on the Scottish island of Jura as George Orwell, suffering from tuberculosis, arrives with plans to write the novel that will become 1984.
Writer-director Raoul Peck isn’t content to give us a timely account of the creation of that anti-totalitarian masterpiece, however.
Braiding in Orwell’s potted biography (with Damien Lewis voicing Orwell as he reads from the writer’s correspondence) and the ‘natural hatred’ of authority and colonialism Orwell developed whilst serving as a young police officer in the British Raj, Peck also inserts contemporary documentary footage from Gaza, Myanmar, Honduras, and the US as he explores the methodology of historical fascism, investigates the concept of ‘objective truth’ in the context of ’s ‘Newspeak’, and illustrates Orwell’s commitment to democratic socialism with scenes from a variety of film adaptations of and .
It’s a bravura work, and a very fine testament to Orwell, whose cautionary tales becomes more prophetic by the day.
- All theatrical releases
