Films made on a shoestring budget have a few tell-tale signs. They feature long takes with a static camera, for instance, or a full cast of unrecognizable faces. Or, as in the case of South Mountain, they are contained to a single location. In the case of South Mountain, that one setting is a home in a placid small town in the Catskills with a vibrant veggie garden. Unfortunately, this film falls prey to another common symptom of the low-budget production: it is boring.
South Mountain just never quite comes together. It is a combination of a character study of its protagonist, Lila (Talia Balsam of “Mad Men”), and a hangout movie. While Balsam is a good actress more than capable of personifying a character as a realized person, the material here lets her down. She does not get to do much: her husband Edgar (Scott Cohen) is a philandering jackass workaholic (much like in her role on “Mad Men”), her friend is going through cancer treatment and her teenage daughters are off living their own lives. Balsam does well to give depth to Lila, but there is not enough here to get a viewer deeply invested enough for the character study to work. As a hangout film, South Mountain is similarly flawed; the house in the Catskills might be a good place for a hang, but the people living there—aside from Lila—all suck and no rational person would want to be around them. Cohen’s Edgar, especially, repeatedly wrecks the film by being exactly the sort of OK-Boomer New York City narcissist that literally everyone hates. There is probably gender and/or age bias built in to the reticence the viewer will feel to hang out within this film, as Lila is a fifty-something woman rather than one of Linklater’s teenaged stoner-cum-philosophers or Kitano’s stoic yakuza, but even if that is the case, it does not help the film be not boring. Mostly it fails as a hangout film precisely because most (or even all) of the side characters are one-note or despicable and Lila’s character has too few lines to carry it by herself.
This is not to say that there are not elements of South Mountain that are enjoyable or worthwhile. The editing style, often featuring rapid cutting, is a welcome change from the slow cinema typical of movies dealing with the financial constraints that it is. Lila as an exhausted mother working hard to carry a household through the perennial mini-catastrophes that plague it will strike a chord with most people; this being the week of Mother’s Day, it is probably okay to openly confess that it is women/mothers who bear the brunt of the emotional labor and the thankless repetitive social reproduction work of ensuring that a family makes it from Tuesday to Saturday without violence or malnutrition. To see that struggle on film is almost enough to make South Mountain worthwhile.
Ultimately, however, the film never makes a statement of purpose. Why are we watching Lila struggle to negotiate everyday life? She does not get enough to do as a character for this to be a heroic tribute of this universal every-mother figure. There is too little emphasis on Cohen’s execrable Edgar to make her a martyr. The sense that the film is not building up to something—be it a grandiose climatic set piece or a moral—is a technique that might work for Ozu, but here only exacerbates the boringness problem that plagues South Mountain at its foundation.
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