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Note: the author of this review watched The climb on a digital home screen. Before you make the decision to see it – or any other movie – in a movie theater, please consider the health risks involved. Here is a meeting in the matter with scientific experts.
On a scenic trail of French asphalt, American friends Kyle (Kyle Marvin) and Mike (Michael Angelo Covino) engage in a bike ride that has just hit its most difficult stretch. Kyle marries the love of his life. Mike is his witness. The two have known each other since childhood and their joke is easy and jovial. Or it’s just until Mike drops a bombshell: He’s sleeping with the bride-to-be – and does, every now and then, ever since Kyle met her. “If I catch you, I’ll kill you,” Kyle blurted out. Mike’s response: “Yes, that’s why I waited for the hill.”
To the pantheon of extended and meticulously choreographed shots, we can now add this scorching piece of scenery, the nine-minute opening sequence of The climb. The film captures Mike’s confession and its immediate fallout in one curvy take; what we are watching is a friendship imploding in real time. This is the rare and special case where keeping the camera moving really benefits the material: like Kyle and Mike, we are trapped in a glove of discomfort, not spared by the artificial delivery of a cut. Plus, it’s just more fun watching the actors navigate an emotional minefield while literally navigating the bends and traffic of a long road, delivering lines through gasps for air.
The scene could work perfectly as a standalone short – and in fact, it’s how it started. Marvin and Covino are real friends and also the filmmakers; the latter directed The climb from a script they wrote together. They widened their one-shot, stand-only version of the story in a feature film asking where these characters could go, and how their lives could change, after this fateful journey. And in doing so, the two made an ambitious, biting, and often surprisingly funny, comedy about the difficult attempt to mend a friendship after a party shattered it with betrayal.
The climb unfolds like a series of perfectly delineated and extremely awkward vignettes: small, inspired sitcom episodes, each one moving audiences forward in time, with changes in character appearances marking their passage. (At one point, they seem to change body types, with Mike picking up the extra weight Kyle lost.) The zigzagging course of the tale can be as unpredictable as that of life; it’s a film that begins with the implicit annulment of a marriage and immediately heads for a funeral. Movies anchor is the disorderly relation to its center and the well-defined personalities. Marvin plays Kyle as a jack of all trades – a true one-man golden retriever, so forgiving, loyal, and lovable that everyone in his life goes through him. Mike, on the other hand, is a distinct kind of asshole: Covino, who has a bit of the air and temerity of a young Oscar Isaac, passes on the internal wrestling match of a selfish person trying to rebuild himself into something better with faulty tools.
The film’s comic sensibility is unique, even new. It is nuanced and broad, anchored in emotional reality but always sensitive to flights of musical fantasy and bursts of sudden violence. (Mike, damaging in many ways, destroys not only homes, but also their tables and dishes; he also has a rather symmetrical habit of getting his ass kicked by strangers.) Covino stages several of the low-key storylines of the movie. film the same way he does. the opening one: via long, uninterrupted shots, including a Christmas sequence that captures multiple conversations with a Steadicam prowling around the perimeter of the house like Michael Myers. Some of those choices feel more motivated than others – it’s the kind of business card debut that sometimes betrays, through his bravery blossoms, a director with something to prove. At the same time, so much of American comedy is directed so indifferently that it is especially refreshing to meet one that makes the camera a co-conspirator in its fuck fun, creating the dialogue scenes and extending it. voltage.
Over the years, the two men come in and out of each other. The survival of their bond eventually becomes tied to Kyle reconnecting with his high. school sweetheart, Marissa, played by glowGayle Rankin. Mike, like everyone in Kyle’s family, thinks she’s a bad person for her friend, and this becomes the fuel for his misguided crusade for redemption – some sort of romantic, unfortunate but all-out suicide mission of sabotage. sincere. Is it possible to do something wrong for the right reason? The climb doesn’t take sides in this sort of love triangle – in part because Rankin, in a superbly acerbic performance, makes Marissa too fun in her frankness and sympathetic in her exasperation to deserve our disdain. Whether she’s right about Kyle remains an open question, straight into a final bittersweet stretch that subverts all expectations about where these flawed people might end up.
Either way, the biggest mystery might be whether Mike is made for Kyle. Can he change? Can anyone? The climb never denies that their friendship is dysfunctional and perhaps irreparably toxic: a collision of the unstoppable force of Mike’s pathological destructiveness and the immovable object of Kyle’s inability to walk away. Yet the film also believes in the true love the two men have for each other, to the point that it flirts with the conclusion that someone can be a bad friend and still be a person you want in. your life. There are no easy-to-bring sentimental answers or shortcuts in this unusually prickly buddy comedy. Like Kyle and Mike, he just keeps moving forward, in the hope that some sort of clarity can materialize at the top of the hill.
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