Appearances to the contrary, The Mountain Between Us (20th Century Fox, 10.6) is not Touching The Void with a love story on the side but a love story with Touching The Void on the side, except it’s not as good as Touching The Void. Plus it’s a love story from hell, or certainly one afflicted with crabby vibes
Photojournalist Alex (Kate Winslet) and Ben (Idris Elba), a mild-mannered surgeon, decide to share the cost of a chartered small plane after their commercial flight is grounded at some airport in Idaho. Their older, overweight pilot (Beau Bridges) suffers a mid-flight stroke and they wind up crashing atop a mountain. They both survive, but after two or three days it’s clear they’ll have to hike their way down to civilization. Various threats manifest (predators, foul weather, hunger, a near-fatal fall, thin ice) but you knew that going in.
The best kind of hetero love story is one in which (a) a profound connection has occured and you’re dying for the would-be lovers to make something out of it, but (b) they don’t due to some overriding expectation or previous commitment or third-act tragedy. The worst kind of love story is one in which the woman is obviously a high-strung, Type-A ballbuster (Kate) and the guy is too thick to understand what he’s run into, and then he falls for her and they fuck and so on, and your feelings for him are torn between pity and contempt.
I saw The Mountain Between Us at the Toronto Film Festival, and you could just feel the “oh, no” current in the room. Everyone knew that Idris had made the wrong move. I was telepathically screaming “fuck, dude…you have a life and an honorable profession and many responsibilities back east, and you’re becoming romantically interested in a woman who’s obviouslynodayatthebeach on top of trying to survive amid snow and icy temperatures and mountain lions?….what are you doing, man?”
I believed in Winslet as an object d’amour 20 years ago in Titanic, but that’s the glow of youth. Now she’s 42 and a bit weather-worn. She’s been through this and that with kids and a divorce and a house fire and everything else, and you can just tell by her anxious, fretful expression in those stills from Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel that she’s a stressed-out, high-maintenance handful.
I can’t say I “enjoyed” watching Blade Runner 2049 last night, but I can honestly say this morning that it’s gained upon reflection.
I’ve sat through my share of futuristic jizz-whizz fantasy flicks — nutrition-free wanks that you don’t respect the next morning. Denis Villeneuve‘s 30-years-later sequel to Ridley Scott‘s 1982 Blade Runner is no cheap-high ride — it’s a grim dystopian dream-trip, ruinously “beautiful” but soul-draining — but if you just surrender to the toxicity and allow it to pollute your system and your soul, you’ll probably realize the next morning that Villeneuve has deepened and expanded the overall tale. He’s made a serious film to which attention must be paid.
Perhaps not in a way that will matter all that much in the general realm and yes, you might feel a little sick from all those residual poisons, but a few hours later you’ll be glad you submitted. Because as much as I disliked sitting through it, Blade Runner 2049 stays with you, and that’s always a mark of something profound or at least high-fibre-ish.
It lasts an eternity — I checked my watch at least five or six times, and my muttered mantra all through it was “I don’t give a shit about any of this, I don’t give a shit about any of this, I don’t give a shit about any of this” — but it’s certainly a major vision thing. Pay your $16 dollars and sink into a thoroughly gloomy realm of super-holograms (including ones of Frank Sinatra and Vegas-era Elvis Presley), rot, ruin and industrial scrap, a toxic shithole populated with grim-faced characters you would just as soon squash as look at, a world of hair-grease and sprayed sweat and impassive, cold-death expressions, and all of it blanketed with rain, snow, sludge and chemical mud-glop.
And oh, yeah, for a story that you won’t give two shits about. A dingleberry doodle plot involving memory implants and oscured lineage and a secret no one must know (no one! just ask Jared Leto!) and a little wooden horse with a date (6.10.21) carved into the base, and some shit-hooey about original replicant creator Eldon Tyrell having given Rachael, the experimental replicant played by Sean Young in the ’82 original, the organic potential to reproduce and blah blah. And a narrative pace that will slow your own pulse and make your eyelids flutter and descend, and a growing need to escape into the outer lobby so you can order a hot dog and check your messages.
BR49 should have run two hours, not two hours and 44 minutes.
Do yourself a favor…seriously. Before seeing it this weekend, read the Wikipedia synopsis. Doing so will remove the irritating, hard-to-follow story tease and allow you to just concentrate on the visuals, which is all this thing is about anyway. It doesn’t matter anyway — nothing does, it’s all shit and distraction, you’re all just contributing to the Warner Bros. bottom line, to Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford‘s wealth while you subtract from your own. We’re all punks, fools, suckers, knaves. Warner Bros. pours a little whiskey onto the plastic floor, and like Ford’s Blade Runner wolf dog we lick it right up.
Fuck the story, fuck the lineage factor, fuck it all. Just sink into the chilly murderous vibe and Gosling’s impassive, glazed-over robot eyes, and Ford’s subtle emotional delivery (has he ever cried before on-screen?). Nobody cares and it doesn’t fucking matter if RG or Ford or Kevin Tsujihara are replicants. I’m a replicant with the capability of siring children and writing a daily column. What difference does it make if I’m an android or not, or if I dream of electric sheep? Nobody cares, nothing matters, it’s all bullshit.
What of the virtual-reality ho chick, the homicidal super-bitch and the brittle, tough-cookie supervisor played by Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks and Robin Wright? Smart women will not be pleased. (After the show a friend was listening to a whipsmart feminist deploring these characters and the phony, piss-poor writing.) For these are cardboard, non-dimensional figures (women acting like men or fulfilling men’s fantasies) who would never be hatched by a woman screenwriter. Grow some soul and awareness, Hampton Fancher and Michael Green.
How important is Gosling’s little wooden horse, and how does it feed into everything else? I’m still scratching my head about that, but I’m sure someone will explain it later today. Is Gosling’s “Joe” the replicant son of you-know-who? I didn’t give a shit. Is there any kind of emotionally satisfying undercurrent in any of this? Fuck no.
There’s one moment — one! — that made me sit up in my seat and say to myself “wait, hold on, this is semi-poignant.” But the spoiler whiners will kill me if I get specific. It involves Ford and a younger woman — I’ll leave it at that.
I knew this wouldn’t be a glorious, all-around triumph. I knew it would be brilliant but problematic. I knew not to trust those rave reviews written by balding, bespectacled and/or heavyset dweebs. If they’d written “it’s a bear to sit through and it makes you feel like shit, but it’s a masterpiece,” okay, but too many of them just wrote “it’s a masterpiece!” This is why people don’t trust critics. They live in their own world.
