“I come from a long line of Holocaust survivors,” Anna (Zoe Lister-Jones) says to her husband, Ben (Adam Pally) in one of their early, vicious verbal spats in Band Aid. Without missing a beat, Ben fires back “How could you come from a long line of Holocaust survivors?” This corrosive dialogue fills much of the film’s first third, a depiction of a marriage in total collapse that recalls the acrimonious sibling relationship in Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel. Young but hardened, Anna and Ben would seem headed for impending divorce if they did not give the impression of being committed to taking the other person down with them.
Ben and Anna’s misery rolls off of them, and their friends tend to tiptoe around them as if navigating a minefield, though both are more than willing to publicly air grievances. Only Ben’s mother (Susie Essman), far removed from the action and mostly heard on phone calls instead of seen, carries on as if the two were a happy couple, obliviously asking when they will be having kids. Ironically, the only time that Ben and Anna show any fondness for each other is when they find themselves at a friend’s party for their toddler’s birthday and they unite to mock every aspect of it. Desperately maintaining poker faces around one mom’s awkward admission that she named her child Isis before news events rendered that name verboten, the two also find ways to sublimate their open hostility into passive barbs at those who are living better lives, like an old classmate of Anna’s who enjoys a stable writing career despite Anna showing all the aptitude and ambition in college.
The film’s plot kicks into gear at the party when the two pick up some toy instruments and improvise a song, needling each other in a gentle, playful way instead of their usual venom. Seeing a possible path to some kind of happiness, Anna suggests that the two form a band and sing about their issues with each other. The premise threatens to take twee indie contrivance to its limits, but the pair writes shockingly coherent, viable songs in their garage, with lyrics that twist their nasty domestic squabbles into relatable drama with wry humor instead of cutting wit. Even the music isn’t so bad, the couple’s simple guitar ‘n bass combo augmented by the capable drumming skills of their weird, recovering sex addict neighbor Dave (Fred Armisen, who casually walks away with the movie with his affable nature and unguarded talk about barely tamped-down lust). It’s hard to say whether the breezy but acceptable quality of the music says more about Lister-Jones’s lyrical abilities or the generally low bar of indie music. Regardless, the scenes of the couple gradually coming to terms with each other are endearing, and by the hour mark, they appear to be well on the road to reconciliation.
That this occurs at the hour mark, however, should give an indication that things are not so simple, but the rupture that follows to pad out the film’s final third is so crass and perfunctory that it completely derails a promising feature. With Anna riding high on a successful live performance, Ben trashes her happiness with a hesitant look on his face as if the character was aware of being pushed toward a hideous plot twist and visibly struggled against tearing open healing wounds. The reason for the couple’s sorry state, addressed earlier in the film, is used as fodder for outright cruelty so mean that no one could possibly forgive it. Ben’s outburst prefigures a half-hour that can only spin its wheels on the path toward a meaningless conclusion, scuttling the complexities of Lister-Jones’s and Pally’s performances in favor of garish, hyper-extended genre formula. Band Aid makes a bracing first impression for its acidic exaggeration of the real issues that can face a couple who do not find the bliss they’d hoped for in marriage. In the end, however, that nasty streak loses its offsetting humor and compassion, leaving only the perfunctory function of its meanness.
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