News

Noah Pritzker’s Ex-Husbands is about how things end: relationships, marriages, chapters in lives, and lives themselves. It’s also about things not ending—the way marriages and marital problems roll on and parents remain flawed, fallible people. And whichever side of this equation Ex-Husbands is musing on, it’s full of memorably mellow humor.

New York dentist Peter Pearce (Griffin Dunne) is nonplussed to learn that his father, Simon (Richard Benjamin), has decided to file for a divorce after some six decades of marriage. Delivered in a disarmingly matter-of-fact manner, their conversation sets the comedic tone for the rest of the film. Ex-Husbands is the sort of funny movie that has few actual jokes. It makes us laugh just by having characters spell out the absurdities they’ve encountered in the simplest terms, like a man in his 80s talking about how excited he is to get back in the dating game.

After a world premiere at the San Sebastian International Film Festival and its North American premiere over the weekend at the Hamptons International Film Festival, Noah Pritzker’s (Quitters) second film goes for a mix of Woody Allen, John Cassavetes, Paul Mazursky, Noah Baumbach and other white male filmmakers, past and present, who enjoy basking in the midlife marital crisis in which many guys find themselves trapped. While not on the level of those acclaimed filmmakers, in this case, Pritzker manages to cast his net wider into an early-, mid-, and late-life crisis over three generations of the men in the Pearce clan.

The result is an engaging indie exercise that’s for sale to any distributor who finds promise in a premise that might be a tough sell for mainstream buyers despite a game cast that lifts it up a notch or two. Art houses would seem to be its theatrical future,...

Perhaps deciding that the relationship tribulations of white, coastal-American men of medium-to-high class-privilege levels — which were well-served on the big screen in previous decades — have been rather overlooked of late, writer-director Noah Pritzker goes back to the well of male midlife neurosis for his sophomore feature and dredges up not quite enough to fill up one amiable indie dramedy. Powered largely by the affability of Griffin Dunne playing a reluctant pending-divorcé whose aging father has recently left his aging mother and whose adult son is having woman troubles of his own, “Ex-Husbands” which world-premieres at the San Sebastian Film Festival, is likable enough in intention, but flounders en route to its destination. Not unlike its befuddled protagonists, who can’t seem to translate meaning well into doing well.

We meet Peter Pearce (Dunne), a New York dentist, in the Walter Reade Theater in New York’s Lincoln Center — like...

Exclusive: Griffin Dunne (This Is Us), Rosanna Arquette (Pulp Fiction), Richard Benjamin (Michael Crichton’s Westworld), Miles Heizer (13 Reasons Why) and James Norton (Little Women) will lead the cast of an as-yet-untitled comedy from writer-director Noah Pritzker (Quitters).

Others joining the ensemble include Eisa Davis (Mare of Easttown), Marcia Jean Kurtz (If Beale Street Could Talk), John Ventimiglia (The Sopranos), Lou Taylor Pucci (You), Echo Kellum (Grand Crew), Ian Owens (Shrill), Pedro Fontaine (Spider), Simon Van Buyten (Chaussée d’Amour), Nate Mann (Licorice Pizza), Zora Casebere (On the Rocks) and Rachel Zeiger-Haag (Monsterland).

The film from Play Book Productions and Pimienta Films—marking Pritzker’s follow-up to the 2015 dramedy, Quitters—will center on Dunne’s character, Peter Pearce. Overwhelmed by his pending divorce from Maria (Arquette) and the declining health of his father (Benjamin), Peter plans a getaway to Tulum, insistent he knows nothing of his sons’ (Heizer and...