Rick Alverson's 'The Mountain' Is A Shimmeringly Surreal Work With Incredible Performances [Venice Review]

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And so we come to the line reading of the year, and it is one syllable: Denis Lavant‘s merciless torturing of the word “art” in Rick Alverson‘s shimmeringly surreal “The Mountain.” Somewhere between a snarl and a spit-take, elongated almost beyond recognition, and accompanied by a full-body shimmy of spasmodic disgust, Lavant’s Jack hurls it at Tye Sheridan‘s somnolent Andy like a diarrheic pigeon dive-bombing a statue. There is much that, by meticulous design, doesn’t quite make sense in the pictorialist, Academy ratio “The Mountain,” doubtless Alverson’s most beautiful act of bafflement to date. But this moment of derision unlocks a great deal: it’s ironic that his most artful film should be the one most scathing about art. With every deliberate frame, with every tricksy cut, we are reminded that art is also artifice, that the way a thing is represented is not at all the same thing as the thing itself.

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This might sound needlessly abstract, but don’t worry, it gets more so: it is the 1950s and Andy (Sheridan, who also exec produces) is the morose son of an ex-figure skater (played, naturellement, by Udo Kier). He is a sullen, sunken, sexually confused boy, who dreams unsettling dreams about hermaphrodites and lives a solitary existence, doing maintenance work at the local ice rink, him and his lonely Zamboni. Andy’s mother was institutionalized some time ago and his dad has denied him access to her, so when Pops keels over on the ice (occasioning an absolutely fantastic Busby-Berkeley-style skating memorial routine in which concentric circles of girls in mustard yellow dresses spin around Udo Kier’s portrait thwapping pink fans open and shut in concert) he is all alone with no chance of finding her.

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Until that is, the mysterious Dr. Wally Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum) comes calling, claiming a connection to both his parents and offering Andy a job as his assistant and photographer. Maybe it’s those deceptively kind, crinkly Jeff Goldblum eyes, or maybe he believes Fiennes will lead him to his mother more surely than his planchette — an ouija-style device designed to make contact with the spirit dimension. Anyway, Andy agrees, only slowly to discover the barbaric nature of Fiennes’ work, and the potential monstrousness hidden behind his owlish glasses, rakish charm and increasingly disheveled hairdo.

Fiennes travels from mental institution to mental institution, performing, almost exclusively on near-catatonic women, a procedure of his own design which employs electroshock pads and a small, sharp metal instrument applied with a firm, precise tap to the upper inside of the eye socket. Andy’s job is to take the women’s’ photographs with a cumbersome old-school Polaroid — pictures we never see, incidentally because here the act of photographing is more important than the photo itself. It inevitably recalls the old superstition about photography — indeed any realistic representation — taking away the soul of its subject, analogous to what Fiennes does more invasively with his little hammer and chisel. And that’s perhaps why later on, Lavant, playing the father of Susan (Hannah Gross) one of Fiennes’ patients/victims gets so comically aerated about Andy’s imagined affinity for a picture of a mountain. Art!

Unfolding in DP Lorenzo Hagerman‘s (Alverson’s “Entertainment,” Amat Escalante’s “Heli“) precisely square, often symmetrical images, punctuated with sublime, extreme slo-mo tableaux, Alverson’s imagining of the 1950s is a fascinatingly subversive, contradiction. Rather than the rosy repository of nostalgist, Norman Rockwell-hued sentiment about the good old days, here the past is syringed of bright colors, stonewashed to an anodyne beigeness in the exceptionally period-accurate yet stylized production design from Jacquelin Abrahams (William Oldroyd‘s “Lady Macbeth,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Lobster“).

The craftsmanship is outstanding. After Josh and Benny Safdie‘s “Good Time,” Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never proves himself an inspired choice for composer, turning int he film’s only overtly anachronistic element, an electro score made up of lonely single notes that sometimes blossom into snake charmer motifs, before going full-on blip-bleep-bloopy like a malfunctioning R2D2. Otherwise simple sequences unsettle subliminally, like a shot-reverse-shot conversation that takes place in a room, we finally notice, that has no entrance — an impossible object, a trick of the camera, a play on the gullibility of the audience in believing what they see.

The performances, as one might expect from a cast bristling with cult favorites, are often delicious, even if Sheridan’s willfully dissociative, torpid anti-acting can sometimes make the crossing of a corridor feel like a trip across the ocean floor. And with everyone else doing so little, we could actually wish Lavant did a bit less (his pidgin Franglais tirade at the end truly feels like it happened on the day, and Alverson though “eh, fuck it, let’s leave it in.”) Mostly though, be warned, the pacing is glacial and the mood chilled to subzero: Lanthimos meets Roy Andersson meets a heavy dose of lithium.

At least it is until the last act, in which we discover that underneath the arch aesthetics and dissociative performances, there is a softly beating heart. “Where do they go, the people you change, after you change them?” asks Andy in an atypical fit of chattiness. He doesn’t get an answer from Fiennes. (The film is full of non-sequitur responses and questions left dangling, “Twin Peaks” style — or perhaps that reference suggests itself because Lynch has also been known to envisage the fatted and sated America of the 1950s as riven with undercurrents of seamy, uncanny rot.) But watching Andy slowly work it out for himself, and come to a conclusion that is both bonkers and yet oddly logical, is unexpectedly touching. So much does not connect here and so much is designed to discomfit that there is unexpected resonance when Alverson lays aside the scabrousness and puts down oddball drollery to remind us that inside every lonely young man, there’s a shivering kid waiting to be picked up and brought in from the snow.[B/B+]

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