For the past few years, pseudo-scientific studies — and the news — have been pushing the theory that society is suffering through a “male loneliness epidemic”. Maybe we are, or maybe we’re all just lonely. Regardless of whether there’s any merit behind these claims, filmmakers have been grappling with the exploration of male emotions for a long time, with varying results. The latest is Noah Pritzker’s decidedly unfunny dark comedy Ex-Husbands which approaches the alleged epidemic with a healthy dose of tough love. If there is an epidemic, then the men at the heart of Pritsker’s indie have been the architects of their own loneliness.
What Is ‘Ex-Husbands’ About?
Ex-Husbands is an intergenerational drama about the patriarchs of the Pearce family as they grapple with their failed relationships with the women in their lives — and each other. It opens with a prelude that telegraphs much of where the film is headed. As Peter Pearce (Griffin Dunne) waits with his father, Simon (Richard Benjamin), for their wives to meet them at the theater, the eldest Pearce reveals that he plans to divorce his wife of sixty-five years because he wants to spend his twilight years “playing the field” and no amount of rational reasoning will change his mind. Concurrently, Peter’s thirty-something-year-old son, Nick (James Norton), has a millennial meet cute with Heather (Natalie Gold) offering her a light outside of a bar. The fact that she’s not at all interested in letting him light her cigarette is a bad omen for where their own could-be relationship is headed.
Flashforward six years later and now Peter is freshly divorced from his wife, worrying about his ailing father, and inadvertently crashing his son’s bachelor party in Tulum, Mexico. The latter element is where most of the action occurs in Ex-Husbands. While Nick and his younger brother Mickey (Miles Heizer) are having their own emotional journey during the trip, their father is having a full-blown existential crisis that goes beyond a mere midlife crisis.
‘Ex-Husbands’ Meanders Through Its Own Existence
Ex-Husbands arrives a full decade after Pritzker’s debut feature film, Quitters, was met with mixed reviews on the festival circuit. While the two films bear little resemblance beyond the filmmaker’s distinctively somber narrative voice behind the camera, some themes seem to cut a throughline between Pritzker’s work, particularly with the fraught relationship between father and son. Before that, his 12-minute short film Little Dad, featured a similar dynamic and a troubled father named Peter, to boot. Once more, Pritzker takes on the task of writing, directing, and producing another film that reaches a hand towards the “mumblecore” films of yesteryear, without finding purchase.
One might argue that there are “darkly comedic” moments throughout the film, but it never strays into the realms of true black humor. Instead, Ex-Husbands teeters somewhere in the periphery of the humanity of Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers or some Baumbachian exploration of melancholy and malaise. It’s like Little Women for men. There are moments where Pritzker strikes gold — Peter’s realization that even his patients are looking elsewhere, Mickey falling for a married man, and the quarrel at the cemetery — but much of that relies upon the familiarity of the emotions at play. These are not new concepts. We’ve all been here before. And, perhaps, that is the cure for loneliness. A shared experience.
The Performances Make ‘Ex-Husbands’ Worth the Watch
Pritzker may not be reinventing the wheel with Ex-Husbands, but there is a sincerity to the film that is quite charming. The script approaches each character with a depth of empathy that perhaps shouldn’t be all-too surprising for a film about middling, non-impressive white men and their emotional baggage, but it is, nevertheless. The characters feel real — and infuriatingly so.
Norton (sporting a jarringly American accent) beautifully handles Nick’s aloof detachment. Everyone around Nick comments on his disregard for others and how unpleasant he can be to be around as he sinks deeper into the “double depression” that led to his broken engagement, but we only see a glimpse of his melancholy and woe. Instead, Norton plays Nick like a smart, entertaining friend, and a loving brother and son. Nick doesn’t see the personality traits that push everyone away because to him it’s all a performance, so we get to see the act, too. It’s a clever performance that carries the film when the focus is on him.
Ex-Husbands simply wouldn’t work without Dunne’s doddering Peter. It might be an ensemble, but Peter is the slow-dying heart of the film. He spends much of the runtime on his own, reacquainting himself with what it means to be single and, even more so, what it means to feel like a burden. Not just to his sons (and particularly Nick), but to himself. Everywhere Peter goes, he tries to forge connections and make friends because he seems afraid to be entirely alone with himself. It leads to one of the more compelling moments in the film. Toward the end of the second act, the night of Nick’s bachelor party finally arrives and Peter is met with a pity invite to join the festivities. He arrives early and strikes up a conversation with Otto (Nate Mann), who is in town for his wedding. Where he’s met with apathy at the dinner table with his sons, Otto is delighted to listen to Peter talk, so much so that he invites him to the wedding the following day.
It’s these performances that make up for Ex-Husband’s somewhat lackluster execution. Where the script falls short, Norton and Dunne pick up the slack and carry these characters through to the finish line.
Ex-Husbands
The performances make up for the lackluster execution in Noah Pritzker’s Ex-Husbands.
- Release Date
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September 22, 2023
- Runtime
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98 minutes
- Writers
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Noah Pritzker
Pros & Cons
- Griffin Dunne and James Norton give excellent performances, selling Ex-Husbands? father-son dynamic even where the script falls short.
- Noah Pritzker?s sophomoric return is more refined than his freshman debut, showing promise for where his next film might take him.
- The film harkens back to a dated era of filmmaking, which helps to bring a quaint familiarity to it.
- At a cozy 90 minutes, Ex-Husbands manages to feel quite long, likely due to the film?s pacing issues that makes the first act drag on.
- The film feels miscategorized as a ?dark comedy,? lending itself toward being a family drama with glimmers of irony more than anything else.
- Some of the subplots, like Mickey?s, feel lost in the shadow of Peter and Nick, and elements are never addressed again.
