Review: The Mountain Is a Profound Parable About Representation and Reality

For all its emotional restraint, Rick Alverson’s film builds to a point of remarkable pathos.

The Mountain
Photo: Kino Lorber

The defining feature of Rick Alverson’s films is an elision that registers as a confrontation, which, at first glance, might seem like a paradox. Where most filmmakers employ gaps and absences as sleights of hand, sneakily leaving something out so that it may be felt more deeply in hindsight, Alverson pushes a sparseness of style, narrative, and characterization to the point of agitation. In his latest film, The Mountain, that strategy takes many forms, from the slew of unanswered questions raised by the screenplay co-written by Alverson, Dustin Guy Defa, and Colm O’Leary to the extremely austere approach to its setting, a midcentury upstate New York dressed with only the bare minimum of period signifiers (cathode-ray-tube TVs, high-waisted trousers, earth-toned Buicks). Like Alverson’s previous films, The Mountain is predicated in part on a repudiation of audience desire for clarity and closure, but the withholding in an Alverson film is less an act of hostility than an invitation to investigate what exactly these virtues mean in the first place.

Andy (Tye Sheridan), the morose young man at the center of the film, seems to desperately need clarity and closure. Haunted by the absence of his institutionalized mother and faced only with a distant figure skating-instructor father (Udo Kier), Andy represents a workable guinea pig for Dr. Wally Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum), a shifty, overfriendly lobotomist who needs a portrait photographer and general utility player for an upcoming string of asylum visits. As though sardonically riffing on Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, Alverson first presents this as something of a mentor-student partnership, one more likely to turn parasitic than mutually beneficial, and indeed, Andy’s slumped shoulders and taciturnity recalls Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell, while Wallace’s suspicious joviality and way with middle-aged women make him a distant cousin to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd. But Andy and Wallace’s relationship only grows more distant and obfuscated as the film goes on, to the point that they eventually cede the stage to another figure altogether: the wild, inexplicable Jack (Denis Lavant), a Frenchman found loafing around at one of the mental institutions.

Well before the film gets to Jack, though, and also to his shell-shocked institutionalized daughter, Susan (Hannah Gross), Alverson spends ample time setting the grim mood of his minimalist 1950s. Guided by an ambient score by Robert Donne that makes stirring use of the theremin, The Mountain offers a procession of meticulously composed and art-directed tableaux, each a stifling container for the rigidly choreographed bodies within. Cinematographer Lorenzo Hagerman’s soft, dim lighting, which creates an uncanny sense of neither day nor night, draws upon Edward Hopper, while Alverson’s habit of lingering on a master shot for a pregnant minute before dollying in at a lugubrious pace, typically parallel to a wall or another flat surface, evenly distributes the menace across the film so as to leave no doubt that America’s postwar boom was less a period of enlightenment than a purgatory.

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Indeed, if Alverson’s two breakthrough films, The Comedy and Entertainment, offer a darkly satisfying two-part essay on the limits of irony as a defense against the contemporary world’s chaos, with protagonists who erect willfully off-putting personas to quell their frustration with and alienation from all that surrounds them, The Mountain places the emphasis on a different kind of alienation—specifically that which is borne from a longing for experience, love, sex, anything. The ’50s are understood as an era of repression, an idea crystallized by the caustic use of a degraded “Home on the Range” on the soundtrack as a false promise of freedom and escape. Andy’s own rural life is a toil of boredom and yearning, then of grief and despair when his father suddenly passes of unexplained causes in one of the film’s more gutting elisions. His imagination, meanwhile, is a muddle of Oedipal longings that manifest, without adequate life experience, as hermaphroditic visions, one of which appears to be set in the same black void where Scarlett Johansson traps male visitors in Under the Skin.

That Wally sees an opportunity with the lonely, blank-slate Andy is symptomatic of his exploitative professional practice, which involves nailing pins around the eye sockets of his patients before lobotomizing them. Seemingly modeled after the pioneering practices of early 20th century neurologist António Egas Moniz, the particulars of these surgeries are neither explicated in dialogue nor comprehensively shown by Alverson—all the better to make what little we see of them utterly chilling. Tagging along to take portraits of these patients with the seeming intention of raising Dr. Fiennes’s profile, Andy plays a wary spectator during the procedures, and receives little in the way of reassurance from Wally in the hotels and diners where they spend their evenings. By the time Jack and Susan enter the narrative, Andy’s distrust of his devious employer, though never explicitly indicated, is palpably felt.

For all its emotional restraint, The Mountain builds to a point of remarkable pathos around the arrival of Susan, with whom Andy feels an intimate kinship, given that she was a fellow inmate of his mother. But the momentary emotional breakthrough is deflected by a cruel turn of events that leaves both characters in deeper chasms than the ones in which they began. In one fell swoop, the institutional will to “cure” the damaged mind and Wally’s particular brand of entrepreneurial egomania are roundly condemned, but Alverson isn’t content to leave us with a simple moral lesson. The film’s real confrontation is with the gap between representation and reality, a distinction Andy must grapple with when he snaps his photos, and about which Jack delivers a roundabout, and perhaps too on the nose, monologue toward the end of the film. In Alverson’s vision of the ’50s, seldom is heard a discouraging word, but rather than a mark of cloudless bliss, that’s an indication of a profound unrest.

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Score: 
 Cast: Tye Sheridan, Jeff Goldblum, Udo Kier, Denis Lavant, Hannah Gross  Director: Rick Alverson  Screenwriter: Rick Alverson, Dustin Guy Defa, Colm O’Leary  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 106 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2018  Buy: Video

Carson Lund

Carson Lund's debut feature as a DP and producer is Ham on Rye. He also writes for the Harvard Film Archive and is the frontman of L.A.-based chamber pop duo Mines Falls.

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