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Sundance Film Festival 2019
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Little Drama Mama

Stage and screen reviews from a theater geek and cinephile who also has four kids, a dog, a husband, and a career as a professor and director.

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Little Drama Mama

“The Mountain,” a Lobotomized Film


Tye Sheridan and Jeff Goldblum in "The Mountain"

This might win the award for "Absolute Worst Film I've Ever Seen at Sundance." It was so... slow... it... nearly... put... me... in... a...... catatonic...... state.........


How was I tricked into seeing this film? Well, listen to the description. "The year is 1953. Andy, a young, introverted teenager (Tye Sheridan), works as a Zamboni driver at an ice rink where his father is a flamboyant skating instructor. Andy's mother is institutionalized. When Andy meets Dr. Wallace Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum), a famous lobotomist now in the sad decline of his career, the shy young man joins the doctor on a tour of rural mental hospitals." Sounds intriguing, right? A flamboyant skating instructor? Lobotomy? Mental Institutions? I was fascinated.


I TOTALLY should have read further where there is a description of director Rick Alverson's work. "Alverson, known for his grim, hypnotic body of work, has crafted another cryptic odyssey through the backroads of America."


And a cryptic odyssey it was.


Here's the real plot. Depressed Andy lives with his abusive father who is a figure skating teacher, and works as a Zamboni driver at the rink where his father works. After his father's death (which happens really early in the film), Andy meets Dr. Wallace Fiennes, the doctor who most likely lobotomized his mother. Dr. Feinnes invites Andy to travel to rural mental hospitals to photograph the "before" and "after" effects of the lobotomized patients. Andy meets a young woman whose father thinks she's crazy, when really she's just spirited. In the end, Andy gets lobotomized so he can spend the rest of his life with this woman in a catatonic state while it is really the rest of the world that is crazy. Oh my gosh, even my plot description sounds better than the move really was. Slow doesn't even begin to express the absolute snail's pace of this movie.


There was almost zero acting from Tye Sheridan. 90% of the movie was watching him stand or slowly loaf around in a stupor - and that's BEFORE his character was lobotomized. Even Jeff Goldblum's performance wasn't engaging. I mean, that takes some serious directing to dis-engage Jeff Goldblum, right?


I wanted to leave about 30 minutes from the end, but my husband convinced me to stay by saying, "There's just got to be a pay-off." There was no pay-off. What we got was a tortured, scrambled, quasi-French rant by a lunatic drunk at the end. I literally wasted an hour and fifty minutes of my life. Not to mention that this film was at the Salt Lake City Library, which is the most uncomfortable venue. There is no leg room, and you are literally packed like a sardine into your minuscule seat.


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