The Mountain (Rick Alverson, 2019)
Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2019 4:09 am
This is the first film I've seen of Alverson's, and it's a strange film, in some ways that are interesting and some ways that are less so.
Right off the bat, it seems like a self-conscious attempt at cult-film status, with the casting of a who's-who of cinematic oddballs. Jeff Goldblum, Udo Kier, and Denis Levant make appearances ... Crispin Glover wasn't available, or what? Kier is completely superfluous.
It's a film that, very oddly, is a polemic against ... lobotomies, of all things. It's a baffling experience to watch a film released in 2018 that feels the need to go so far out of its way to tell us that lobotomies were bad, and I felt like Ringo Starr in Popstar, baffled that Connor4Real had made a song advocating for legalizing gay marriage after it had already been legalized. Is there a single person alive who would defend the practice of lobotomy today? It seems like opposition to lobotomy is less controversial than even opposition to slavery.
Anyway, that aside, the film plays like an experiment in making the viewer feel lobotomized. It's filmed in a slightly washed-out haze and edited in a fashion that makes it hard to concentrate very fully: conversations are ended abruptly and then forgotten, music and ambient sounds suddenly grab your attention and then fade away, and things in general just sorta move slow. It's not at all dream-like, but rather disorienting; yet without being completely alienating, as if you're there but not completely plugged in to what's going on, susceptible to distraction without being able to summon the energy to get worked up about it.
On an experimental formal level, I admire it somewhat, but I still find myself wondering to what end. It's certainly not satisfying to me on a narrative level, and I still can't shake the feeling that the whole thing is in service of telling me something that I (along with literally everyone else) already know.
Right off the bat, it seems like a self-conscious attempt at cult-film status, with the casting of a who's-who of cinematic oddballs. Jeff Goldblum, Udo Kier, and Denis Levant make appearances ... Crispin Glover wasn't available, or what? Kier is completely superfluous.
It's a film that, very oddly, is a polemic against ... lobotomies, of all things. It's a baffling experience to watch a film released in 2018 that feels the need to go so far out of its way to tell us that lobotomies were bad, and I felt like Ringo Starr in Popstar, baffled that Connor4Real had made a song advocating for legalizing gay marriage after it had already been legalized. Is there a single person alive who would defend the practice of lobotomy today? It seems like opposition to lobotomy is less controversial than even opposition to slavery.
Anyway, that aside, the film plays like an experiment in making the viewer feel lobotomized. It's filmed in a slightly washed-out haze and edited in a fashion that makes it hard to concentrate very fully: conversations are ended abruptly and then forgotten, music and ambient sounds suddenly grab your attention and then fade away, and things in general just sorta move slow. It's not at all dream-like, but rather disorienting; yet without being completely alienating, as if you're there but not completely plugged in to what's going on, susceptible to distraction without being able to summon the energy to get worked up about it.
On an experimental formal level, I admire it somewhat, but I still find myself wondering to what end. It's certainly not satisfying to me on a narrative level, and I still can't shake the feeling that the whole thing is in service of telling me something that I (along with literally everyone else) already know.