Noah Pritzker’s ‘Ex-Husbands,’ Led by an Exemplary Cast, Feels Like a Woody Allen Film From Back in the Day
Playing the disheveled, disabused, and eminently placable Peter Pearce, Griffin Dunne elevates the picture’s sitcom-like trappings to something more poignant and recognizably true to life.
About a quarter of the way into Noah Pritzker’s “Ex-Husbands,” two brothers discuss the vagaries of life while sitting at an outdoor cafe. The older of the two asks: “You know that feeling when you’re watching an experimental movie and you’re like 30 minutes in and there’s still no plot and no suspense, no real mystery?” He takes a drag on a cigarette, drops an expletive, and concludes: “That’s where I am in my life.”
Mr. Pritzker’s picture is by no means experimental, but the plot does wander, its suspense is mild, and mystery is all but beside the point. “Ex-Husbands” is a circuitous venture, an affable throwback to the kind of thing Woody Allen made back in the day: a New York-centric meditation on the privileged classes and their travails. As the title suggests, the bonds and boundaries of marriage are tested by those in the orbit of our protagonists, the Pearce family.
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