The Climb

I greatly enjoyed the way "The Climb" was filmed, with its complicated tracking shots and eccentric musical interludes. But I couldn't stand the characters in it and I didn't care at all about their story, so it's a shame so much style was wasted on lame material.

The movie examines the relationship between two buddies and ponders why one of them, Kyle (played by Kyle Marvin), puts up with the other, Mike (played by Michael Angelo Corvino), despite the fact that he is a complete jerk and ruins moment after moment of Kyle's life. The answer to that question, as the movie disingenuously concludes, is that Mike is the only person who knows what's best for Kyle, and though he's been nothing but a toxic presence for the entire length of the film, he's been right all along. Ugh, give me a break.

I don't have any patience at all for the man children Marvin and Corvino bring to life in this movie. Corvino especially, doing his best Casey Affleck impersonation, is intolerable. Clearly we're supposed to find him maybe at times frustrating but overall charming, which justifies woman after woman finding him irresistible even though he's repulsive, and which is why Marvin's doormat character can't tell him to take a flying leap. The problem is that Corvino is never as funny and charming to us as he thinks he is to himself. It's no surprise that he co-wrote the film with Marvin and directs it. Someone with more distance from the character needed to take the reins of this movie if we were to have any sympathy for him.

I actually liked quite a few moments in this movie, but more because of how they were staged than because of what was happening in them. It's a movie full of wasted potential.

Grade: B-

A pitch-perfect comedy-drama from start to finish, The Climb is a funny, intelligent, organic and touching tale of friendship. Dealing with a sobering yet equally farcical story that lasts over many years, the film is full of honest emotion, and somehow manages to deliver a sprawling story of a lifetime in a very short space of time.

And that's where I want to start, because while there's a lot about The Climb that's really impressive, the way that it feels almost like an epic is incredible. Running for less than 100 minutes, most films would struggle to tell a more contained story, let alone one that spans such a long timeframe.

However, as it moves through the years in impressively organic fashion, The Climb is able to bring a greater scale to its story, and as such brings greater stakes and significance to the table as well. The ups and downs of Mike and Kyle's friendship aren't just a blip in time, but a major part of their entire lives.

Along with the two fantastic lead performances and excellent writing, you really feel like you know these two characters inside out, and though their relationship may be far from perfect as time goes by, you sympathise strongly with both of them from beginning to end.

Another impressive characteristic of The Climb is its minimalist style. It's not obnoxiously minimalist like many mumblecore movies, but it's able to tell a sprawling story of a lifetime without ever following generic tropes of the epic format.

The film is able to pack its story into such a concise runtime because of the way it uses organic dialogue to such great effect throughout. As we jump through time between different vignettes, the screenplay explains what has happened in the last few years or however long with just a couple of words offhand from a character that feels entirely natural to the situation at hand.

There's no clunky exposition or drawn-out narration, but rather succinct and brilliantly organic dialogue that helps what could have been a regularly abrupt series of time shifts flow so nicely.

That structural flow is also helped by the movie's camerawork, which pulls the Birdman trick of using long, long, long takes where the camera flies around the characters for minutes on end without a single cut.

The whole movie isn't a one-shot story like Birdman, but each of its vignettes are more or less made up of a main single shot that lasts for a long time. However, in tandem with its elegant screenplay and flowing structure, that visual style works really nicely, and only adds to the film's brilliantly organic nature.

The screenplay itself is both funny and touching, with humour that made me laugh on a consistent basis, but that never cheapened the real depth and gravity of the story being told here.

The movie looks at the story of a toxic friendship as a sobering farce, with the almost unrelenting nature of Mike's terrible behaviour becoming so bad that it's actually funny. And yet, even when the story seems to be beating you over the head with a rather heavy dose of dark humour, there's a really touching, positive message at its core.

Finishing on a wonderful high note, The Climb proves that you sometimes have to go through the worst of times to end up in the right place, and its sprawling feel makes that resonate all the more strongly. With excellent performances, gorgeous cinematography, an intelligent and funny screenplay and a brilliantly organic style, it's an undeniably captivating movie which always has its heart in the right place.

Movie was ok and there were some amusing bits, but I couldn't class it as a comedy. I even started to get a little bored and lost interest in the 2 main protagonists before the end. The part that made me the happiest was when it had finally finished.

The Climb starts off fun, over the top. But it becomes a tedious, boring affair. The characters are so unlikable and such absolute idiots. If the leads had died half way through the film and a completely new movie had started, I would have applauded.

Michael Angelo Covino's directorial debut is a small indie dramedy about two friends, Mike (whom he plays) and Kyle. They have a lasting friendship and a variety of shared interests including cycling, but things start to get dicey right off the bat in the film's opening chapter when Mike reveals that he's having an affair with Kyle's fiancee. The rest of the film is essentially a bunch of vignettes of their personal, and evolving romantic lives. It's cut in several chapters, most of which have very few takes. While this creates some moderately engaging cinematography within the context of a very low-budget indie dramedy, the rest of the film is sadly rather bland and forgettable.

As leading characters, Kyle and Mike aren't especially all that interesting. Kyle is the more redeeming one, with a more impactful yet still modest home and familial life; whereas Mike's flaws are abundantly clear even well past his affair. While they both are developed, they're not especially that interesting. The chemistry between them on screen is fine, but it's not too engaging. Their characterizations don't feel especially original, much less anything we haven't seen before. It seems that Covino's message is that viewers should understand that even their close friends can make major mistakes and are very flawed, but he doesn't do an especially unique or original job trying to get this point across over the course of the story. While we know that Mike is not trustworthy, the plot doesn't end up really reflecting this in the way it should on how Kyle's personality evolves over the course of the story. The film's down-to-earth script has a few mildly funny moments here and there as well as a more serious side, but the effectiveness of the various situations the characters find themselves in (biking together, a funeral, celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas with family, a wedding, and so forth) aren't really made more impactful by the dialogue. The film is paced briskly and edited well, but its formulaic character development and not-completely-engaging plot makes the film's narrative run out of gas a bit before the credits roll. Since the film is a character-driven piece, it doesn't really captivate the viewer at all since we're never especially captivated by the characters or how the writing defines them to be. Overall, this was a fine and passable independent comedy-drama, but it doesn't quite justify the acclaim it received from Sundance back in January. 6/10