The Mountain – first look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

The Moun­tain – first look review

04 Sep 2018

Words by Michael Leader

Two men seated in a sparse room, one man sitting in a chair, the other standing.
Two men seated in a sparse room, one man sitting in a chair, the other standing.
Jeff Gold­blum plays against type to unset­tling effect in this zany road movie from writer/​director Rick Alverson.

Tye Sheri­dan – return­ing from Enter­tain­ment, new­ly in-demand fol­low­ing his turn in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Play­er One – is Andy, a with­drawn lad work­ing in the beige back­rooms of an ice rink, liv­ing with his skat­ing coach dad (Kier, always a com­mand­ing, ser­pen­tine pres­ence) and at an exis­ten­tial impasse. So when the oppor­tu­ni­ty aris­es to hitch a ride with Dr Wal­lace Fiennes, a charis­mat­ic physi­cian who tend­ed to Andy’s insti­tu­tion­alised moth­er, he grabs it.

Alver­son utilis­es the pre­dictable unpre­dictabil­i­ty of lat­ter day meme peri­od’ Gold­blum to unnerv­ing effect, uncov­er­ing a strain of men­ace behind the cheeky, charm­ing man­ner that is rarely seen on screen. By evening, Fiennes flirts with women over pin­ball machines and pon­tif­i­cates in his pants, pipe in hand, while perched on the edge of a motel bed. By day, though, he per­forms lobot­o­mies on dozens (per­haps hun­dreds) of men­tal insti­tu­tion patients across the Pacif­ic Northwest.

This is a char­ac­ter who isn’t pre­oc­cu­pied with whether or not he should enact his chaot­ic the­o­ries, as his instru­ment finds a way into his patients’ brains, in a vio­lent, pen­e­tra­tive act, over the top of the eye­ball and through the sock­et. Wal­ly’ Fiennes is loose­ly based on Wal­ter Free­man, the real-life med­ical pro­fes­sion­al who pop­u­larised the lobot­o­my as an elec­tive form of treat­ment for a vari­ety of dis­or­ders. Mak­ing The Moun­tain a rare case where a Vice Stu­dios film could very well have been based on a Vice arti­cle.

What ensues is an explo­ration of mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­cana and its many freaks, kooks and weirdos that is cut from a sim­i­lar pop-cul­tur­al cloth to the camp-trash of John Waters and the night­mar­ish sur­re­al-pas­tiche of David Lynch. Every fizzing cath­ode-ray tube, crack­ling record and gar­ish cock­tail hints at a col­lec­tive mad­ness that is bare­ly hid­den behind the nov­el­ty. An era in dire need of an injec­tion – or, per­haps, a spike to the frontal lobe. Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Loren­zo Hagerman’s cramped, Acad­e­my ratio fram­ing and Jacque­line Abra­hams’ pro­duc­tion design soon take on a dour, drab oppres­sive­ness: an anti-aes­thet­ic with an ambigu­ous tone that hangs in the air, some­where between the ethe­re­al and the funereal.

And then there’s Denis Lavant, who comes on screen in a man­ner not so much direct­ed, as deployed. Let loose in the film’s late stages, he whoops, hollers, and drawls through half-French, half-Eng­lish dia­logue. Is he a cult leader, a curi­ous dis­trac­tion, or a curve-ball thrown into play just as the film comes to a close? The plot, or what of it that was mod­er­ate­ly gras­pable before­hand, becomes, ulti­mate­ly, elu­sive. Hard to enjoy and even hard­er to ful­ly fig­ure out, The Moun­tain is a tough climb.

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