Canada: Friday, November 13, 2020
Sony Pictures Classics
for language, sexual content, some nudity and brief drug use
http://www.sonyclassics.com/theclimb/
Kyle and Mike are best friends who share a close bond - until Mike sleeps with Kyle's fiancée. The Climb is about a tumultuous but enduring relationship between two men across many years of laughter, heartbreak and rage. It is also the story of real-life best friends who turn their profound connection into a rich, humane and frequently uproarious film about the boundaries (or lack thereof) in all close friendships.
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Gregory M. - Rated it 3 out of 5
"The Climb" Kyle (Kyle Marvin) and Mike (Michael Angelo Covino) are best friends who share a close bond, until Mike sleeps with Marissa (Gayle Rankin), Kyle's fiancee. "The Climb" is about a tumultuous but enduring relationship between two men across many years of laughter, heartbreak and rage. It's also the story of real-life best friends who turn their profound connection into a rich, humane and frequently uproarious film about the boundaries or lack thereof in all close friendships. The film opens in France. The characters in the film are stuck in the past, they hold onto it and romanticize it, as we often do in love. The film starts them in a place that they would inevitably romanticize and that would live in their subconscious throughout the film. There's this inherent passion and pride that we've find in a lot of French people, and French culture in general. At his core Kyle is a good guy, but he's selfish and self-involved. He’s aware of this, and he tends to beat himself up over it. He's also loud and obnoxious at times, but hopefully there's an endearing quality about him. He's always trying to do the right thing. There's a real person like Kyle in most people's lives, the placater who's always trying to make everything right, and who prefers to have peace in his space. Sometimes that can lead to overlooking things or qualities in other people. He's trying to see the best in other people, and ultimately succeeds, the good comes through. Everyone admires that in him, but they take advantage of it. There's an emotional core that allows people to care enough about the characters and at the same time watch them do these reprehensible things. It's like a marriage in that there are complementary elements of each of the characters, which balance each other. In the movie, there are heightened, extreme versions of traits. Both characters have that aren't necessarily their best traits. Mike is a big *******, and Kyle is a big of a pushover. But there's some truth to those things as well. There are several shots in particular where you can tell things are really elaborately choreographed. The stakes are really high for the actors in this scene, every moment from picking their nose to grabbing a dog is so critical for each character. 'The Thanksgiving' scene, where the film introduces the family, is the scene that holds everything together. The audience has to fully understand this world, the family dynamic, the pressures, the love, the comforts, all at once within a single scene, or everything falls flat. What's tough is that everyone in the scene only gets one or two lines, and you've to orchestrate that by finding the most potent version of each character's personality, the essence, and then it becomes a question of isolating and distilling that inside each shot. The challenge in this scene is beating out the rhythm. For 'The Thanksgiving' scene, it's about creating movement, focusing on the pacing and cadence of the rhythm. The scene needs to play out fast and tight for it to feel natural. It's something we're very conscious of. We actively make choices in the film that go against what we would normally expect to see from characters like this. These are guys that are broken and vulnerable, but care deeply about one another. These guys are never going to be able to be apart from one another, it's like family, or love, certain people you can't detach yourself from or get rid of. At the end of the ride in the opening scene of the movie, when they reach the bottom of the hill, they're still friends. In a 7-minute interaction between two characters, we can learn a lot about what's happened without revealing everything you need to know in the interim. That's the way life works sometimes. The film creates something theatrical, with a stylized aesthetic, but also roots it in truthful character and emotion. All of the conversation is about 'mise en scène', how every single moment needed to be motivated, how every direction the camera moves or points is equally motivated by something. It's a very choreographed film, from top to bottom, with camera movement and motion within the frame, while also focusing on truthful emotion. It's difficult to find the balance between what's funny and what's serious in the movie. Comedy comes from a place of truth within a character. When you start to feel something for the characters, the film is going to throw in a fight scene, or diffuse the tension by giving one of the characters a quick joke. It’s more of a feeling we're going after, trying to find comedy in unexpected places. There's a lot that inspires us comedically, and it comes in a lot of different forms. It really just boils down to does it make us laugh. There’s a French touch. Filmmakers like Claude Sautet and Bertrand Tavernier are revelations. There’s a cinematic instinct of French filmmakers that's so counterintuitive to our experience of American culture in terms of where their camera looks, how they move it around, how and what the characters are saying to each other. When you watch some of these movies, you're bowled over by some of the profound choices made by the filmmakers. There's an authenticity, and openness to those movies that's completely inspiring to us. When you're riding, you do a lot of thinking. We're riding up a hill, but there's a metaphor in that, of course. It's sort of what life is, we get beaten up by life in different ways, and you kind of heal, and scar, but then you keep on going, it always feels like this uphill climb. Cycling is pain, it's one's willingness to endure pain for long periods of time, and the greatest cyclists are the people who live in that pain and enjoy it. That's what resonated with us, because that's what living life passionately is about, being willing to suffer and endure pain and find enjoyment in it somehow. And arguably the harder you live, the more pain you've to be willing to absorb. Every character in this movie is on a climb, it's not a singular journey. We're all on our own climb. written by Gregory Mann
