After Hours reunion!! It’s been nearly 40 years since Griffin Dunne was seen puzzling over the plaster-of-Paris bagel-shaped paperweights manufactured by Rosanna Arquette’s roommate in Martin Scorsese’s riotous 1985 all-nighter.
They book a return meeting in Noah Pritzker’s altogether more gentle and maturely reflective Ex-Husbands, essaying a recently-divorced couple who are teetering on retirement age and grappling with the precipitous home-straight of life on Earth. Not that we see much of Arquette, as she slinks into the backdrop of a film (clue’s in the title) that focuses almost exclusively on male anxiety and the wistful, self-annihilating desires of XY chromosome types.
It’s worth saying from the off that, casting choices aside, that’s the only thing that Mr Plitzker has purloined from Mr Scorsese, as this is a film that takes things very slow and steady, with a soundtrack of AM radio toe tappers and a script that trades heated conflict for goofily-reasoned discourse and homespun domestic philsophies. The best way to describe it is that it resembles a Noah Baumbach film, had Baumbach been writing while dosed on heavy sedatives which served to negate his blackly-cynical worldview.
Dunne plays Peter, a doddery New York dentist with a still-gorgeous head of hair who is shocked by the fact that his elderly father has decided to divorce with a crazed view to taking one last shot of finding true love. Six years later, he too is decorating his own bachelor pad, finding himself out on his ear at the behest of his wife (Arquette). His eldest, Nick (James Norton) is a depressive wastrel who’s in the process of torpedoing his own engagement to betrothed, Thea. While younger, recently-outed Mickey (Miles Heizer) tries to stay sane as his family members all melt down around him and he’s having trouble hooking up in a meaningful way.
Ex-Husbands is a risk-averse comedy of generational malaise that still manages to charm via its easy interactions and doleful performances. Peter gifts his father a framed poster of Ernst Lubitsch’s über-farce, To Be or Not to Be, and there are hints of that film early on when it turns out that Peter accidentally booked the same resort in Tulum that Nick and his squad were headed to for a bachelor party, that things are headed in a similarly screwball direction. Contrived set-up aside, there are no more curious coincidences or wild plot machinations, as Peter and the boys have a pleasant, uneventful time together, reflecting on their failures and attempting, often unsuccessfully, to boost collective morale.
Dunne in particular makes for a compelling lead, his character never really presenting as the annoying, self-involved derp that his family claim he is. And the film is all the better for its measured approach to characterisation rather than dumping lots of comic challenges on the players’ laps. Peter’s obsessive dark side only emerges right at the end, when his dedication to the institution of marriage – even for divorcees – is presented in a chillingly eccentric coda.
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