For all of the conservative wistfulness for the 1950s as a time of prosperity and happiness, time has increasingly revealed the dark underbelly of the era, the unprocessed trauma of World War II that was broadly buried under increasing materialism and other forms of superficial masking. This has been increasingly explored in art, most especially “Mad Men,” which positioned the cultural revolutions of the 1960s less as a radical break from the norm than the inevitable rupture of so much social self-repression. The Mountain, Rick Alverson’s latest, approaches postwar anomie in similar fashion to another chronicle of inchoate despair, The Master. Where Paul Thomas Anderson’s film depicted the rise of cults that mingled spiritual and material searches for happiness in a perverse embodiment of capitalistic self-regard, Alverson’s film suggests that the institutions from which such cults broke were every bit as susceptible to quackery and greed.
The film follows Andy (Tye Sheridan), a taciturn young man who works as a handyman for a local skating rink and lives with his alcoholic, sedentary father (Udo Kier). Early scenes seem to emanate from Andy’s total introversion and silence: Alverson uses static frames with minimal action to show the boy’s dull life sharpening skates and shoveling chipped ice off the rink. The dark side of life is shown literally darkened: coworkers’ backroom gambling and bathroom trysts are shot in plunging chiaroscuro even as these activities are seen by many, hidden but in plain sight. Alverson communicates much through presence and absence. We first see Andy’s dad sitting in front of the TV in a drunken stupor, the image still with his dulled senses, and when the film later returns to the living room to see the TV playing to an empty chair, we know even before we subsequently see Andy selling off possessions and receiving condolences that the man has died.
The sedate aesthetic of the film endures, but the film’s pace kicks up when Andy comes into contact with Dr. Wallace Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum), a mental institution physician who claims to have been one of Andy’s mother’s doctors. Andy had previously alluded to his mother, and he inquires about her status, only to be told that she was released from care and is now in parts unknown. With nothing to keep him rooted, Andy decides to accompany Fiennes on his travels as the doctor goes on a cross-country tour promoting his theories on mental health, serving the man as valet, photographer and whatever task is needed.
Just as the shiftless, traumatized nobody in The Master latched on to the powerful charisma of a confident con-man, so too does Andy fall under the sway of Fiennes. Goldblum has played up his quirky persona for years now, emphasizing the odd cadences of his speech and the unpredictable tics of his body language, but here he compresses that energy into a more studied, calming presence. Fiennes’s medical demonstrations frequently go wrong, but he shrugs off botched surgeries with such cool that you think a sudden spurt of blood when he nails a chisel under a patient’s eye were all normal. Everywhere the pair goes, Fiennes seduces local women, and his oily charm runs rampant in scenes such as one where he delights two women by listing the classic movie stars he thinks they resemble. Yet as Fiennes’s theories and practices become discredited faster than he can travel, Goldblum begins to let the stress seep into Fiennes. The doctor’s hair, so beautifully styled, often falls apart from sweat, his gelled hair clumping to reveal patches of thinness and sending strands into wild directions that resemble the expressionistic locks of Rudolf Klein-Rogge’s mad scientists in Fritz Lang movies. Even Fiennes’s seductive powers start to corrode him; the spirit is ever-willing, but he looks increasingly haggard after each tryst, staggering back to his hotel rooms looking like an old, decrepit man.
Fiennes is such a magnetic presence that when he starts to dip out of the film in the second half, he leaves a void that Sheridan’s practiced emptiness cannot possibly fill. Andy, lonely and searching, clearly empathizes with the sedated, silent mental patients throughout, and he even falls for Susan (Hannah Gross), a young patient whose occasional displays of fortitude and defiance stand out amid the institutionalized and broader societal conformity of the age. Their relationship, mutually awkward and inexperienced and performative in its gestures of normalcy, initially promises to send the film into the next gear just as its intentional sluggishness was threatening to eat itself. Instead, things get diverted, with Andy and Fiennes holing up with Susan and another released patient, Jack (Denis Lavant), in a mountain cabin with the wide glass walls of an Eames of van der Rohe home.
This sudden restriction of movement from a road trip movie to a kind of hideout drama manages to slow the film down even more, even when focus shifts from Fiennes’s controlling hand to Jack’s unhinged ranting as the latter starts to hold court in the house. In Jack is a dark mirror image of Andy’s late father; both men suffer from alcoholism, but where Andy’s father slowly wasted away, Jack raves and writhes in his illness. Lavant, one of modern cinema’s most gifted physical performers, gets several scenes in which he contorts his body into paroxysms of fear and loathing. But there’s nothing deeper to Jack, only splenetic rage, and as much as his scenes may jolt the film out of its sedated lull, they also derail the film rather than re-orient it. Lavant’s extraneous, ill-fitting performance takes time that would have been better served deepening the film’s most meaningful angle, that of the relationship between Andy and Susan. The initial, haunting atmosphere of The Mountain never builds to any great revelation, nor even the sort of anti-epiphany of The Master, but in Andy and Susan’s heartbreaking efforts to leverage each other to fit in to normal society, including an unnerving final image of the two embracing their last chance at forcing happiness.
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