‘Ex-Husbands’: San Sebastian Review

Dir. Noah Pritzker. US. 2023. 99 mins.

As the title suggests, Noah Pritzker’s comedy Ex-Husbands is very much about men rather than women, but its depiction of modern male agonies carries its masculinity-in-crisis premise lightly. Its title may knowingly echo John Cassavetes’s 1970 film Husbands - another movie about men taking a break abroad from their woes – but this is a much less abrasive and less aggressively heterosexual proposition. With a vibrantly charming lead from Griffin Dunne, and enough melancholic worldly wisdom to leaven the humour, Ex-Husbands is an accessible, ostensibly lightweight offering but one nevertheless carried off with expertise, intelligence and empathetic insight.

Following its San Sebastian competition premiere, this is likely to chime on a modest but healthy scale with mature upmarket audiences who yearn for the classy character humour of bygone decades.

Writer-director Pritzker made his mark with 2015’s Quitters, a character piece that earned comparisons with Todd Solondz – which suggests something rather more acerbic than the sweetly rueful tone of Ex-Husbands, which is closer to the gently cynical wit of, say, Noah Baumbach or Nicole Holofcener. A prelude sees a New York restaurant worker, Nick (James Norton), clicking with the young woman who will become his fiancée, while his dentist dad Peter Pearce (Dunne) puzzles over why his own elderly father Simon (veteran actor and film-maker Richard Benjamin) has announced that he’s going to divorce his wife of 65 years.

A clever cut on close-ups of hands with, then without, wedding rings marks a six-year jump. Simon is now in a care home with dementia following his wife’s death, and Peter is contemplating the prospect of the single life after his wife Maria (Rosanna Arquette) has decided to divorce him.

Meanwhile, Nick is booked on a bachelor jaunt with a bunch of friends and his gay younger brother Mickey (Miles Heizer), as a prelude to his wedding  – although glimpses of Nick’s taciturn depression suggest that not all is healthy on that front. The venue is a beach resort in Tulum, Mexico – and by a coincidence that the film never quite persuades us to buy, Peter happens to be headed there that very weekend, to his sons’ annoyance.

While the younger contingent get stuck into a round of beach sports, drink, drugs and generally bro-like behaviour, Peter decides to spend a quiet time alone, glumly solitary among the gleaming young revellers at his hotel. Meanwhile Mickey, who has only recently come out, finds himself attracted to one of Nick’s bachelor crowd, Arroyo (Pedro Fontaine) - a married man who identifies as straight but has a catalogue of gay experiences to recount, and seems keen to collect more.

Ex-Husbands seems to settle comfortably into a wry holiday movie groove, but the fun – with all its upmarket lifestyle gloss – can’t last forever. Before long, the Pearce men return to New York to contemplate questions of mortality and the end - or the endurance - of love, romantic and familial.

This is a film which knowingly carries a weight of film history – both in the casting of Richard Benjamin, whose screen legacy goes back to 1969 Philip Roth adaptation Goodbye Columbus, and in the reunion of Dunne and Rosanna Arquette, seen together in Martin Scorsese’s 1985 After Hours. A consistent big- and small-screen presence over the years – of late, as a regular in TV series This Is Us – Dunne has increasingly attracted attention as a director, notably of 2017 documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. But it’s refreshing to see him at screen centre again, with his relaxed, genially wry – and, at moments, arrestingly cantankerous – performance here.

As his older son, James Norton – these days screen and stage status after his turn as a deranged killer in BBC crime series Happy Valley and epic preformance in the West End production of ’A Little Life’ – holds the attention in a very restrained, laconic performance as the troubled Nick, while Heizer, hitherto best known as the mainstay of Netflix show 13 Reasons Why, enjoys what could prove a breakout part as the youngest but most emotionally mature of the Pearce males. Arquette’s Maria drops in long enough to offer a memorably pithy rejoinder to Peter’s angst; Benjamin kicks the show off nicely with a crisply comic evocation of older male self-delusion; and John Ventimiglia has a delicious cameo as a bumptious estate agent with Hunter S. Thompson’s taste in cigarette holders.

The score by Robin Coudert – a.k.a. ROB – is a little over-assertively glossy, as is the look of the Mexican vacation settings, as photographed by Alfonso Herrera Salcedo. But overall, any excessive polish is undercut by the tart tone of the humour, which prevails throughout – notwithstanding the odd (ironic) moment of I-love-you-guys fuzziness.