First of all, the movie title is not a properly named one, especially in its English title. The movie title in Chinese is trying to use the Fuchun River as the backbone of the storyline, but when titled it in English, the movie producers just ludicrously borrowed an old Chinese painting title and changed the Fuchun River to Fuchun Mountain. It got nothing to do whatsoever with the mountain at all but a bunch of people who live by the river in all miserable and hopeless conditions.
Leo Tolstoy wrote in his "Anna Karenina": 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Writer/Director Gu Xiaogang has used his own last name to create a family with the same last name, with a widow mother and four sons. None of them was happy or success, all struggling with their own difficulties but with the same dilemma when their mother got a heart attack/stroke then became senile.
The problems of this movie are many, but some were just too obviously: 1) All the characters in this movie were supposedly to be borned and grown up along the River, in the same prefecture, same city, same province of China, yet they didn't have the same local accent. There were even some obvious actors from Taiwan, I think, with even completely different accent. 2) The dialog sometimes just felt a bit awkward and unrealistic, especially the conversation between the eldest son's daughter, a kindergarten teacher, with her local boyfriend walking along the Riverg. They got two different accents but not the local one. Then the fourth son who met the young woman at the same time on the riverside, neither of them talked with the similar local accent. 3) The actress who played the Kindergarten teacher got a very long and pointed unnatural plastic chin. She looked just too out-of-place weird.
This movie inevitably forced me to think a bit cynically: Why I need to know these peoples' miserable lives, lifestyles, their daily struggles, difficulties and dilemmas, don't I have my own, too many and too much already? Same questions could be applied to: Why I need to watch those movies full of lowlifes, junkies, murderers, serial killers, prisoners, drifters, grifters, criminals, con men, losers or people with dimentia or Alzheimer's disease? Do I need to know more about these kind of people to affirm how lucky that I am not one of them or not yet to become one?
This movie is just too tidbits, overly common and nothing special to the 1.4 billion Chinese minus the CCP members. I'd rather watch a documentary purely about this Fuchun River or Fuchun Mountain itself without any made-up or true story focused on the PEOPLE who live by the river or in the mountain. Then I'll deal with my own problems afterwards.
