Wistful, mild-mannered comedies about the First World Problems of well-heeled white men are not exactly in fashion right now, but writer-director Noah Pritzker’s Ex-Husbands is proof that this emphatically old-school formula can still deliver gentle laughs and bittersweet wisdom. Set between New York City and the Mexican beach resort of Tulum, Pritzker’s warmer follow-up to his flinty debut feature Quitters (2015) assembles an impressive pan-generational cast led by veteran US actor-director Griffin Dunne (After Hours, This is Us) and British rising star James Norton (Happy Valley, Little Women), with the iconic Patricia Arquette in a small but key supporting role.
A rueful meditation on mid-life melancholy, marital failure, family tensions and looming mortality, Ex-Husbands is a kind of anti-rom-com. Indeed, it could have been called No Weddings and One Funeral. But Pritzker and his team still maintain a genial, broadly cheerful tone despite these darker background currents. The result is a modestly scaled film of understated charm and mirthful moments, a little flat and creaky in places, but hard to dislike.
Ex-Husbands world premieres in competition in San Sebastian this week, the film-makers in attendance after receiving special dispensation from the striking SAG-AFTRA union to promote their low-key indie project. A US debut follows next week at the Hamptons International Film Festival. Dunne’s track record and Norton’s growing international profile should help generate sales interest, with older audiences an obvious target market.
Pritzker’s sardonic, talk-heavy screenplay feels like a knowingly nostalgic homage to American indie cinema’s wry ensemble comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly that lost New York milieu mapped out by vintage Woody Allen, Neil Simon, Mike Nichols and Philip Roth. The casting of 85-year-old actor-director Richard Benjamin certainly feels like a winking homage to this fruitful screen era, while the pairing of Dunne and Arquette as divorcees is clearly a playfully meta reference to their youthful romantic chemistry in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985). Still a dapper charmer in his late sixties, Dunne now radiates a kind of rumpled, soulful grace reminiscent of Alan Alda or Jack Lemmon. The setting may be contemporary, but the mood music here in unashamedly analogue.
Ex-Husbands opens with a deft piece of dramatic symmetry, the first flicker of a budding romance mirrored by the dying embers of a long-term love. Just as hunky but mentally fragile restaurant worker Nick (James Norton) tentatively flirts with future wife Thea (Rachel Zeiger-Haag) for the first time, his sixty-something dentist dad Peter (Dunne) reels from the news that his own elderly father Simon (Benjamin, still a lively screen presence) is divorcing his wife after 65 years together. Pritzker then jumps forwards six years to find Nick preparing for his upcoming wedding, while Simon is now in a nursing home suffering from dementia, and Peter himself is on the brink of divorce from wife Maria (Arquette).
By groaningly contrived coincidence, newly single Peter has booked himself a holiday on the very same weekend, and at the very same Mexican resort location, as Nick’s bachelor party. When postponing his trip proves too expensive, Peter reassures Nick and his younger brother Mickey (Miles Heizer, likeable but colourless) that he will make sure to stay away from their private festivities. Of course, this promise proves impossible. Father and sons inevitably cross paths, when minor friction between them come to the surface in a series of wry, rambling conversational scenes.
The comedic register here is low-voltage farce, with no shock twists or serious conflicts to darken the picture. While Mickey has recently come out as gay, his lusty holiday fling with allegedly straight party guest Arroyo (Pedro Fontaine) is presented as harmless fun, and warmly welcomed by his liberal father. Nick’s struggles with depression and doubts over his impending wedding strike the only glum note here, but they feel somewhat frictionless in such a sunny comic setting, especially coming from somebody with Norton’s pin-up looks and natural surface confidence. Although the Mexico trip ends on a messy, downbeat anticlimax, it ultimately pulls the family closer together.
As the title suggests, Ex-Husbands is inevitably focussed on male anxiety, specifically a rarefied strain of white, heterosexual, middle-class New Yorker angst. Women cast members, especially Arquette, are under-used. That said, the world Pritzker’s film inhabits never feels too socially narrow or self-absorbed, while the background chorus of secondary female, gay and non-white characters are more than just incidental furniture.
Visually, Pritzker and cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo mostly favour a muted, deadpan, indie-movie look. A soundtrack peppered with vintage jazz and folk-rock Americana is another clear nod to older vinyl-era viewers, and generally easy on the ears, although Robin Coudert’s guitar-picking score becomes intrusively sentimental during the heart-tugging finale, a rare heavy-handed mis-step in an otherwise light-touch movie.
Director, screenwriter: Noah Pritzker
Cast: Griffin Dunne, James Norton, Miles Heizer, Rosanna Arquette, Eisa Davis, Richard Benjamin, Pedro Fontaine, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Zora Casebere, John Ventimiglia, Lou Taylor Pucci, Echo Kellum
Producers: Bruce Cohen, Alexandra Byer, Nicholas Célis
Cinematography: Alfonso Herrera Salcedo
Editing: Michael Taylor
Music: Robin Coudert
Production companies: Bold Choices Productions (US), Rathaus Films (US), Pimienta Films (Mexico)
World sales: United Talent Agency (UTA)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (official selection)
In English
99 minutes
