Jeff Goldblum darkly tweaks his eccentric charm as a door-to-door lobotomist in The Mountain
Film Reviews Movie Review
The vision of 1950s America presented by The Mountain, Rick Alverson’s strikingly glum midcentury drama, bears little resemblance to the one that’s come to dominate the pop-culture imagination. There are no white-picket fences, no ostentatious displays of economic prosperity, no hallmarks of Space Age newness—none of the cosmetic clichés that even a withering film about the era might deploy as ironic contrast, the shiny mirage hiding all of our dark secrets and impulses. Shot in the boxy, archaic Academy ratio, which only serves to further deglamorize its spaces, The Mountain expresses the repression of its depicted decade in visual terms: Wood-panel browns and hospital-hallway vanillas color an America so drab it threatens to fade away before our very eyes. Maybe we’re just seeing it through those of its unluckiest characters, the ones who have had a sharp object jammed into them, forever dimming the light of their cognition under the dubious pretense of “treatment.”
The Mountain is set during a time when transorbital lobotomies were still regularly performed, before the medical community rejected the barbaric practice. That makes it the first official period piece from its writer-director, but hardly a change of pace. Alverson has always been interested, some might say exclusively, in malaise—he makes abrasive, depressive meditations on American alienation. Many of these films have been structured around the personalities of a star, placed in a dispiriting new context; The Comedy, for example, presented Tim Heidecker’s confrontational anti-humor as a millennial defense mechanism, while Entertainment spun a sad-clown odyssey of despair for Neil Hamburger, the stand-up-comic alter-ego of Gregg Turkington. In The Mountain, Alverson latches onto the charismatic eccentricity of Jeff Goldblum, casting the much-memed actor as Dr. Wallace Fiennes, an itinerant physician who uses a small pick and silver hammer to sever cerebral connections.
Fiennes is probably based on Walter Freeman II, a real lobotomist from the ’50s often described as a flamboyant character. He was also, by most accounts, a dangerous quack who charged just $25 per procedure, killing a good 15% of his patients and causing irreparable brain damage to many others—including, most famously, John F. Kennedy’s sister, Rosemarie. In The Mountain, Goldblum’s approximation of this real-life monster is basically a traveling salesman: a snake-oil huckster just starting to face the reality that his days inhumanely working the asylum circuit are numbered. The film unfolds not from his perspective but that of Andy (Tye Sheridan, who appeared, too, in Entertainment), a perpetually reserved ice-rink employee still coping with the death of his domineering figure-skater father (Udo Kier). Dr. Fiennes, or “Wally,” who treated Andy’s institutionalized mother, invites the young man to become his assistant, out of some mixture of guilt, pity, and genuine need.
That makes The Mountain, like Entertainment, a kind of haunted road movie, following this mismatched pair as they go town to town, plying an unconscionable trade at any institution that hasn’t turned to alternative methods and medications. Andy, who takes pictures of the patients for the families (always before the surgery, so as not to immortalize the unsightly swollen tissue), is disturbed by the operations, which involve inducing seizures through electro-shock, then pounding the pick into the lower eye socket; those who don’t die on the table are left in a docile state just short of vegetative. “Where do they go?” Andy asks his new mentor/father figure. “The people, after we change them?” He identifies, to an increasing degree, with the patients. The question of whether Fiennes, a drunken lecher when not on the job, lobotomized Andy’s mother isn’t left hanging for long. Once revealed, the information colors almost ever interaction between the two men.
The images, courtesy of Lorenzo Hagerman, have a painterly quality: For all the sharp midcentury detail, there’s a certain vague unreality to them—appropriate for a film partially about the difference between the world and how it’s distorted through presentation. (Would lobotomy ever have been accepted anywhere were it not for the perception that it was helping the patients?) At times, The Mountain possesses the atmosphere of a bad dream, the kind built on awful inevitability. Occasionally, it explicitly blurs the line between waking and sleeping life, Andy’s unarticulated sexual desires butting their way into his world—scenes that connect uneasily and abstractly with the way Freeman’s procedure was sometimes used as a method for “curing” homosexuality. Perhaps not surprisingly for a filmmaker with ties to Adult Swim, Alverson favors very pregnant pauses. He also maintains an interest in oddball supporting characters, sometimes detrimentally: When Andy and the doctor reach a California mountain town in the grips of a New Age spiritual movement, the great French shape-shifter Denis Lavant all but hijacks and derails the movie with some incongruous, over-the-top mugging, playing a healer who wants a lobotomy for his daughter (Hannah Gross).
Perhaps the filmmaker thought he needed some counterbalance to the overwhelming, even single-note moroseness of his material—and his protagonist. Is it a joke or something more, something sadder, that Sheridan’s taciturn introvert almost seems as distant as the bad doctor’s victims, never so much as cracking a smile and rarely speaking above a murmur? Perhaps The Mountain is after a larger point about the way American life pounds people into sedation, no icepick required. Either way, the movie itself sometimes feels a bit lobotomized. But never when Goldblum is on screen. He plays Freeman as a deluded fraud, horrifying but a little funny, too, in that stuttering, seductive Goldblum way. The doctor has, in some respect, quieted his own demons through denial, pathologically insisting his methods are helpful, as a gift to those he mentally incapacitates and their grateful families. One can imagine a film plunging and piercing deeper into his disturbed mind.
15 Comments
stuttering, seductive Goldblum waySeductive Godblum way.
I watched this with great expectations, having loved Alverson’s previous films, but left the theater baffled, but not in-a-good-way baffled. Of course, Denis Lavant in anything is always a highlight. But apart from him, I dunno… Even for slow-paced and nothing-happens films, this one is a bit much.
Yeah I’m surprised about the B grade. I get the reasons why this is SUPPOSED to be monotonous, slow etc…. but it still didn’t pull me in. And I love Goldblum. I think the most accurate sentence in the review is “the movie itself sometimes feels a bit lobotomized.” But Alverson will always be a polarizing filmmaker. Not my cup of tea I guess.
as someone who loved the comedy, i’m not touching this one. sounds like pure miserabilia
I’m obviously biased, but I have trouble imagining a better 1950s lobotomy story than Bojack Horseman’s The Old Sugarman Place. The bar has been set pretty high on this particular subject.
god that episode fucked me up. why, I have half a mind…
The Master did the whole morose, airless 1950s thing, too. Carol sorta also. I’m sure there are other examples.This looks kind of interesting but also too mannered.
“Fiennes is probably based on Walter Freeman II…”Goldblum confirmed as much last night on Colbert, an interview worth watching for the sheer absurdity of Goldblum going wonderfully full Goldblum.
like brendA responded i’m shocked thAt A stAy At home mom Able to eArn $7047 in one month on the computer. hAve you reAd this web site
http://www.amazon78.com
The Fifties was certainly an extraordinary time, but certainly not as its often depicted. I know; I was there. It’s important to remember that the adults of 1955 were the same guys who waded ashore at Iwo Jima and Normandy to defeat universal slavery under Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Even ten years later they were still trying to come to terms with what they had experienced, but they certainly weren’t going to take any shit from anyone.The Fifties was a great time to be a white male. They had all come back from the war, gone to college on the GI Bill, got a great job at Lockheed building fighter jets for the government, married their high school sweetheart, bought a split-level in the suburbs and a station wagon with three-foot tail fins, and had 2.3 children. The economy was booming, good jobs were plentiful, and all that wartime production had pivoted on a dime to consumer goods, so there was a lot of great stuff to buy.Things weren’t so good if you were a woman; they were still largely oppressed by society. Upon graduating high school you could marry some guy and be a wife, or be a teacher, nurse or secretary; that was pretty much it. It was still unusual for girls to go to college, and almost unknown for a woman to have a position of authority in government or business. It was generally illegal for a woman to work or have a bank account without her father’s or husband’s permission. The lobotomy was known as “The Housewife’s Operation”; if you seemed a bit antsy or unhappy to your husband he’d arrange for your brain to be gouged out, at best making you a smiling Stepford zombie, and at worst a vegetable.Things were much worse for blacks. It was still a decade before the civil rights movement got any traction at all, and blacks were still very much second-class citizens, except in the South where they were third class behind Republicans. Segregation was practiced everywhere, by law in the south but de facto almost every where else. Lynchings were still happening, and the FBI under Hoover had a policy of suppressing black organization.On top of all that, the Cold War was at its worst. Russia had the bomb, and a bomber that could reach the US from Soviet airspace; we all expected them to nuke us at any moment. People dug up their back yards and put in fallout shelters, and a favorite cookout conversation was whether you’d really shoot your neighbor if he tried to get into your shelter. We had air raid drills in school, and end-of-the-world CONELRAD frequencies were marked on every radio dial.Overall the Fifties was a time of very high tension, excess, repression and fear. There were some good things like physical prosperity and some really great music, but a lot of bad things too.
The Fifties was a great time to be a white male.
Every decade in America is a great time to be a white male. Other than that I agree with everything else you said
Good overview. I was a child in the Fifties and so experienced it as a child, but my husband was a teenager, and he often objected to the stereotype of it being a time of conformity. On the contrary, he and his cohorts were challenging the assumptions of the culture, travelling across country – don’t forget the Beats – involved with activist folk music, civil rights, seeking to ban nuclear weapons,discovering Buddhism. They were in fact laying the foundation for the activism and challenges of the Sixties.
Actually that sounds just about exactly as it’s been depicted.
My last month’s online earning was $17593 just by doing an easy job online. Easiest home based online job to earn extra dollars every month just by doing work for maximum 2 to 3 hrs a day. I have joined this job about 3 months ago and in my first month i have made $12k+ easily without any special online experience. Everybody on this earth can get this job today and start making cash online by just follow details on this website……….HERE::::: http://www.prizebest.com
Warning: this movie is also super-duper weird, abstract, and intentionally off-putting. The last 10 minutes are basically some French guy drunkenly screaming nonsense at two lobotomized people. I saw it after I read this review and now I am wondering why the reviewer left these facts out of the review. It’s almost like he wanted to trick people into seeing it. I would highly recommend against seeing this movie unless you are big into creepy, abstract, non-linear, artistic, and extremely challenging films.