Butler's Cinema Scene

“MOUNTAIN” My rating: B 

77 minutes | No MPAA rating

Less a conventional documentary than a sort of aural/visual tone poem, “Mountain” is an audacious blend of brilliant cinematography, (mostly) classical music and spoken word performance.

Parts of it work much better than others.

The subjects of Jennifer Peedom’s film, of course, are Earth’s highest places.  The doc was filmed in mountains on every continent, with cinematographer Renan Ozturk often employing drone-mounted cameras that capture astonishing vistas that are simultaneously epic and intimate.

Big swatches of the film are simply jaw-dropping.

And, indeed, “Mountain” is a big-picture sort of enterprise in the style of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 “Koyaanisqatsi.”  No facts or statistics are presented, no quantitative analysis. The script by Peedom and Robert Macfarlane — it’s read by Willem Dafoe — is big on generalizations.

Until about 300 years ago, we are told, mankind shunned mountains and would have considered mad anyone who climbed them for fun. But at some point men began hearing, as Dafoe’s narration puts it, “the siren song of the summit.”  Mountains came to represent not just rock and ice but dreams and desire.

The film opens with magnificent shots of mountains devoid of human occupancy. Gradually human figures begin showing up, tiny and antlike against towering walls of snow and stone.

There’s a montage of climbers falling, only to be saved by a lone safety rope.  Even so, some of them must have suffered broken limbs and ribs, so violently are they bounced around at the end of the line.

There’s a sequence devoted to X-games type sports — skiers, snowboarders and cyclists (motorized and not) who risk their necks traversing mountain slopes. And of course there are those thrill-seeking base jumpers who throw themselves off cliff faces in fabric suits that turn them into human bats, soaring over rugged alpine landscapes.

(At certain times “Mountain” threatens to become an extreme sports documentary…it’s a little schizoid.)

The film makes no attempt to personalize any of these adventurers, be they climbers, skiers or paragliders. They are simply figures in a landscape…there’s barely a closeup of a human face, unless you take into account the Himalayan lama who sits in meditation and to whom the film often returns.

Eventually “Mountain”becomes downright critical of our love affair with mountains.  Time-lapse photography is employed to show a slope being stripped of vegetation for a new resort.  Hundreds of people, skis over their shoulders, await their turn to board a chair lift to the summit.

“This isn’t exploration,” Dafoe intones. “It’s crowd control.”

And the film is indignant over the commercialization of climbing on Mt. Everest, which leads to logjams of parties trying to get up and back in the brief spans of good weather on the globe’s tallest peak.

If “Mountain” sends mixed thematic messages (so…should we not develop mountains, or put a limit on the number of people allowed to visit?) its visual power is off the charts.

As Dafoe says of the mountains themselves, this film is, at its best, capable of “challenging our arrogance, restoring our wonder.”

| Robert W. Butler