Movie Review: The Mountain

The Mountain ** / *****

Directed by: Rick Alverson.

Written by: Rick Alverson and Dustin Guy Defa and Colm O'Leary.

Starring: Tye Sheridan (Andy), Jeff Goldblum (Dr. Wallace Fiennes), Hannah Gross (Susan), Denis Lavant (Jack), Udo Kier (Frederick), Annemarie Lawless (Vivian), Eleonore Hendricks (Grace), Margot Klein (Peggy), Larry Fessenden (Meals), Buddy Duress (Philip Farmer), Alyssa Bresnahan (Claire), Vin Scialla (Marimba).

 

I so hated Rick Alverson’s film – The Comedy – that I ended up skipping his follow-up film, Entertainment – even though it got pretty good reviews. The Comedy starred Tim Heidecker has an aging hipster with a trust fund – the type of guy who deliberately wanted to provoke people by starting sentences with phrases “I don’t mean to defend Hitler, but…”. The Comedy was about this kind of insufferable hipster, and presented him in all his “glory”, but also wanted you to know that it didn’t like him, while at the same time trying to make us feel sympathetic to him in the end. The film was an anti-comedy, that wanted to be the type of film to get laughs out of that Hitler line for example, while making sure you know that the makers of the movie would never say that as well.

 

As evidenced by The Mountain, Alverson has basically just continued down the same path in the years since. He seems to have no desire for a wider audience, no desire to explain his characters, or plots and wants to make his films deliberately off-putting. He has total control over the images in the film – each meticulously framed – and the tone of the film of the film as well. Watching it, you almost wonder if the whole film was an experiment to see if Alverson could cast normally unpredictable actors, who do their own thing regardless of the movie they are in – like Jeff Goldblum, Udo Kier and Denis Lavant – and still maintain that control. Mission accomplished, I guess.

 

The film is set in the 1950s, and is about Dr. Wallace Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum) – who is the one who came up with a less invasive way of performing lobotomies – going through the eye socket with an ice pick – and travelled around America to different mental hospital to perform the procedure. The focus of the movie though is really on Fiennes’ assistant – Andy (Tye Sheridan) – a sullen teenager with a very strange father (Kier) and a desire to know what happened to his mother – who years ago was carted off to one of those mental intuitions herself. He doesn’t much like Fiennes – but travelling with him is a means to an end – to get the information he wants.

 

Sheridan is a gifted young actor – if you’ve only seen him as Cyclops in the X-Men movies, you’re missing out on some fine work in The Tree of Life, Mud and Joe among others – the films that liked brought him to the attention of Steven Spielberg, who cast him in the lead of Ready Player One. Alverson basically uses none of Sheridan’s skill here though – as basically even if Andy is the lead here, his job is to stand in the corner with a blank expression on his face at all times. He doesn’t talk much – and when he does, he doesn’t have much of interest to say. Sheridan must really believe in Alverson – he was also in Entertainment, and served as a producer on this film. Perhaps what they were going for in this performance was subtly – but what really comes across is just blankness. There is nothing much there to his performance – and he gets bowled over by those crazed actors when they show up.

 

For his part, Goldblum is a little more reserved than normal – although he’s still Goldblum here. He can mute himself more when he wants – but he works best when a director finds the right role for him to be who he is (like Wes Anderson has done). Fiennes is a horrible person – for many reasons – and Goldblum doesn’t shy away from any of them. The last act of the movie is basically dominated by Lavant – a mental patient himself, and father of another one (the very Hannah Gross, who I assume the basic direction she received here was “See what Sheridan is doing? Do that”) – as Lavant essentially gives a very long, very incoherent summation to the movie in the last act. It’s basically a sledgehammer to the face, and about as pleasant as that sounds.

 

I will say that there is a part of me that admires Alverson. His control here is complete – the framing precise, the art direction more so, the score deliberately alienating. He is going for a mood here – and achieves it – and more than anything seemingly wants to be aggressively anti-commercial, anti-mainstream, anti-perhaps everything. To describe his worldview as nihilistic would be understating things. Alverson achieves what he wants with The Mountain – I’ll give him that. But is it something worth spending your time watching and thinking about? Not for me.

Movie Review: The Comedy

The Comedy
Directed by: Rick Alverson.
Written by: Rick Alverson and Robert Donne and Colm O'Leary.
Starring: Tim Heidecker (Swanson), Eric Wareheim (Van Arman), James Murphy (Ben), Gregg Turkington (Bobby), Kate Lyn Sheil (Waitress), Alexia Rasmussen (Young woman), Jeffrey Jensen (Cargill), Liza Kate (Sister in Law), Seth Koen (Male nurse), Rock Kohli (Raj).

Swanson is pretty much a protypical hipster. He drifts through his life with no purpose, sees everything ironically, takes nothing seriously, and pretty much makes fun of everyone around him who are foolish enough to have things like beliefs or jobs. He doesn’t have to work – his father is rich, and Swanson is just killing time until the old man finally kicks the bucket, and all the money is his own. Swanson takes no pleasure in anything he does. He is a hollow, empty character.

When we first meet him, he is doing what he’ll do repeatedly throughout the movie – cruelly fuck with another person. The person this time is his father’s male nurse, who he mocks for having a girl’s job, questions his sexuality, and subjects him to an endless series of questions about a distended anus. Swanson clearly thinks he’s better than the nurse – just like later he thinks he’s better than the gardener he mocks, the wealthy couple who employs the gardener, the cab driver he subjects to a racist rant and the group of black men he subjects to an even more racist rant. But he’s not a racist – he’s just an ironic racist, making racist jokes not because he believes them but because, well, I have no idea. His only two hobbies other than mocking other is to seduce gullible young women and get them back to his house boat. He does this is pretty much the same way – by saying hugely inappropriate things (“I’m not saying I agree with Hitler, but…”). His other hobby is to hang out with his equally obnoxious hipster friends – all sporting the same silly beards, sunglasses, shorts and flip flops – ironically, of course.

If The Comedy was a more honest movie, it could have been a great one. But it seems to want to have it’s cake and eat it to, and that dooms the film to the miserable failure that it is. This is a movie made for hipsters, by hipsters that criticizes hipsters. If Swanson’s main sin is being so ironically detached for life, what does it say about the filmmakers who have, of course, ironically named their film The Comedy, when the film is anything but funny.

Swanson is a deviant little psychopath, unable to feel empathy with anyone around him, and unable to bring himself to care. One of his hookups has a horrific end that isn’t about what he does, but rather what he doesn’t do – which is pretty much anything. No matter what is happening around him, Swanson cannot bring himself to give a shit. Perhaps the point of not giving any of the female characters in the movie a name – they are even identified in the credits as Young Woman, Waitress, Sister-in-Law – is that Swanson doesn’t care enough about them to even learn their names, but it still comes off as rather crass and sexist. But where the movie truly lost me is in the late going, when all of a sudden, it starts to ask the audience to feel sorry for Swanson – that deep down, he really is a person too, with real feelings, that he is simply masking with his ironic detachment. What a crock of shit.

The movie has other problems as well. The film makes it’s point about Swanson’s detachment in the first scene, and then proceeds to bludgeon us to the death for more than an hour with the same point again and again and again. We get it. But one thing in the movie that works, strangely enough, is Tim Heidecker’s performance as Swanson. He is actually perfect as this obnoxious asshole. I’m not a fan of Heidecker’s previous work – earlier this year, he and his partner in crime Eric Wareheim (who appears here as one of his friends) made Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (an extension of their TV show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) and it is the only movie from 2012 that I turned off part way through. After about a half an hour of their brand of no-comedy comedy, I was so annoyed I wanted to put my fist through the TV screen, so decided to just turn it off instead. But in The Comedy, Heidecker proves he can actually act if he wants to. What he needs next time is a real movie – not this horrible, empty, dishonest, ironically detached movie that tries so hard to make you think Swanson is an asshole, and then tries to convince you he has feelings to. This is one of the year’s worst films.