In Charles Martin’s novel “The Mountain Between Us” and in director Hany Abu-Assad’s new big screen adaptation of the work, the mountain is as literal as it is metaphorical. Martin’s story begins with a twin-engine charter plane crashing in the High Uintas Wilderness in Utah, killing the pilot and leaving two strangers stranded in the middle of nowhere, cut off from civilization and communication. The survivors are stuck on a steep peak, with nothing but hills and cliffs on the horizon. They won’t be able to get to safety unless they can make it across not just one mountain, but several.
So the “Mountain” part of the title makes sense. It’s just the “Us” that Abu-Assad and credited screenwriters Chris Weitz and J. Mills Goodloe seem to have forgotten.
Idris Elba stars in “The Mountain Between Us” as Dr. Ben Bass, a neurosurgeon with a keen intellect and an overabundance of caution. Kate Winslet plays Alex Martin, a photojournalist who was rushing home to Denver for her wedding day when her commercial flight was cancelled due to weather, forcing her to book a charter flight with a similarly under-the-gun Ben (who needed to get back to Baltimore for an emergency operation). The duo have to work together to survive, which the movie’s title suggests will be enormously difficult, perhaps due to some sort of personality conflict or deeply ingrained biases that’ll make it tough for them to trust each other. And frankly, that conflict never materializes.
It’s sort of admirable that the filmmakers are so willing to buck convention, rather than forcing the audience to spend an unpleasant hour or so with two characters who bicker constantly before predictably forming a bond. Instead, “The Mountain Between Us” just leans in that direction occasionally, by having Alex be more impulsive and Ben more practical — and the two of them differ on strategy as a result of their tendencies. Whenever these two do argue though, it feels forced. They get along so well generally that any moments of tension are just dramatic contrivance, meant to add some spark to yet another scene of a surgeon and a shutterbug trudging through snow.
This lack of an old-fashioned ‘bristling then befriending’ arc wouldn’t be so much of a problem — in fact, it’d be welcome — if “The Mountain Between Us” were more successful as an intense outdoor adventure. There are few genres more inherently cinematic and exciting than survival tales, which show humans thinking their way through impossible problems and making a series of clever moves, coupled with hard physical labor. This film, though, spaces out its big thrills. Even when Alex gets attacked by a cougar and Ben nearly slides off a cliff, Abu-Assad and company introduce the danger and then resolve it quickly, without ever showing the audience how long it takes these two to recover from the setback.
“The Mountain Between Us” isn’t a bad movie, overall. The scenery’s gorgeous, the two leads are enormously appealing, and nothing about the dialogue or visual style particularly grates. This is an easy picture to watch… and to root for, in a way, because it’s so rarely overbearing.
But it’s only ever mildly engaging. The story skips a lot of fairly essential steps, like showing the conversations Ben and Alex have during the days that they spend stuck at their makeshift camp, or having them break down exactly what their planned objective is from mile to mile of their hike through treacherous terrain. Without those little touches — and without dwelling more on how quickly these two went from having urgent business to being plunged into a life and death struggle — there’s not really much to pull the audience through to the end. The big hook here is meant to be an occasional tease of Ben’s personal problems, which he refuses to discuss with Alex. But neither that nor the pair’s growing intimacy on the trail is enough to give the movie much oomph.
“The Mountain Between Us” went through a tumultuous development process, with multiple directors, screenwriters, and stars attached during the five years it took between when the novel was optioned and when shooting began. Somewhere along the way, the drive to bring this project to fruition seems to have sputtered. Everyone involved at the start must’ve believed that this book absolutely had to become a movie. No one remaining at the end appears to have remembered why. [C+]
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