Perhaps because he decided that the relationship travails of white, middle- and upper-class American coastal men, which had been well-represented on the big screen in previous decades, had been overlooked of late, writer-director Noah Pritzker returns to the well of middle-aged male neurosis for his second feature and unearths information that isn’t enough to fill an enjoyable indie dramedy.
Driven largely by the affability of Griffin Dunne, who plays a reluctant divorcee whose elderly father has recently left his elderly mother and whose adult son has his own issues with women, “Ex-Husbands,” which has its world premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival, is pleasant enough in its intention but stumbles along the way to its destination. Not unlike its bewildered protagonists, who seem unable to translate meaning well into doing it well.
Director: Noah Pritzker
Writer: Noah Pritzker
Stars: Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Richard Benjamin
We meet Peter Pearce (Dunne), a New York dentist, at the Walter Reade Theater at New York's Lincoln Center (like many of the film's indicators of cultural sophistication, this one is pretty clearly indicated), where he goes to see a movie with his father Simon (a prickly Richard Benjamin). As they await the arrival of their respective wives, Simon confides in his son that he has decided, at 80, to divorce Peter's mother (his wife of 65 years), calculating that he has another "25 good years" left in the field. Peter, horrified, points out the mathematical fallacy, but Simon's mind is already made up. Across town, at about the same time, Peter's son Nick (James Norton), in his mid-thirties, is exchanging angry glances with a pretty woman outside a bar.
Six years later, the elderly Simon's optimistic projections have come to nothing: he is in a nursing home and barely responds to Peter's stilted, cheerful chatter. Among the only murmurs he manages to utter is a word that sounds a lot like “Tulum,” which Peter latches onto: He’s just decided, in a depressed mood over his impending divorce from Maria (an underused Rosanna Arquette), to head to the Mexican resort town for a short vacation. He claims he doesn’t know it’s the same date and destination as Nick’s bachelor weekend, as Nick is now engaged to the woman he met at the bar. But when his other son Mickey (Miles Heizer), in his capacity as Nick’s brother and best man, insists that his father cancel the trip, Peter discovers that everything is nonrefundable and sneaks onto the plane, determined not to disturb his sons at their bachelor party bacchanal.
But Nick is hiding a secret from Mickey, his father, and the group of friends who have flown to Tulum to celebrate with him. He and his fiancée are estranged, basically because Nick has never managed to “get his affairs in order.” Nick, suffering from a melancholy that doesn’t sit well with such a strapping guy, eventually confesses to the breakup, which somewhat ruins the mood of boyish hijinks. Meanwhile, Peter, staying at a nearby hotel, has started a mild flirtation with Eileen (Eisa Davis), who’s in town to officiate her goddaughter’s wedding, while Mickey, who’s openly gay but reticent, has been secretly dating Arroyo (Pedro Fontaine), one of Nick’s seemingly straight and married friends.
This borderline sitcom setup is rife with dramatic opportunities, but Pritzker’s script consistently favors sad anticlimax over conflict. And while the characters remain likable in their broad strokes, they’re pretty infuriatingly vague on the details: The gang of Nick’s closest friends, save for the unpredictably boorish Lowry (Simon Van Buyten), remain largely undifferentiated except by ethnicity and/or tolerance level for Lowry’s masculine energy. Nick, who we’re repeatedly reminded is very bright, is known for his scathing opinions on books and movies, but he never actually says anything about any particular book or movie. And even the seemingly promising reunion of Dunne and Arquette in After Hours is barely tapped into, perhaps because Pritzker was afraid that an overt reference would take the viewer out of the movie, when there simply isn’t much of a movie here to take them out of.
Though vaguely in the vein of early Woody Allen or the middle years of Noah Baumbach, the writing here has none of their astringency. In the gentle and polite camera work of cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo, the boys face problems such as a beach unexpectedly full of seaweed, the absence of an acquaintance for a trip to the sea, and the lack of a car.
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