The Climb Review
The film was unheralded when it premiered -it took home it the Coup de Coeur award during the 2019 Cannes Film Festival — The Climb is a delight. The film was written by and starring real life friendships Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino (who also directs) It's a satire about a toxic male relationship that is portrayed over seven segments and several years. Drawing heavily on Marvin and Covino's real-life friendship the film explores the long distances (and deep) that men will go in order to protect their friendship in a low-key, humorous and awe-inspiring ways.
The film's opening segment began in the form of a short film of eight minutes and it's a flawlessly constructed comedy skit that is sufficient to satisfy but with enough the seeds of character and story to develop over the next six episodes. The film begins with student jock from high school Mike (Covino) as well as the amiable male Kyle (Marvin) riding uphill through picturesque France. The exhausting journey takes place as part of the stag party to celebrate Kyle's upcoming wedding ceremony to Ava (Judith Godreche) the bride of his dreams. Mike takes as an occasion to inform Kyle that he's been having a sexual relationship with Ava for the past three years. The humor comes from Kyle's anger, which is tempered by exhaustion (Kyle: "If I catch you, I'll take you to the grave." Mike: "That's why I've waited so long for the climb") as well as being accented by punctuation markers (a group of professional cyclists racing by creates an appropriate pause to the conversation) along with the camera capturing the whole thing in one shot, capturing sly humor in the shifting distances between the two of them.
A carefully played, meticulously observed rare.
In the paper world, The Climb sounds like an old-fashioned Sundance material – a witty analysis of relationships with actors you've never heard ofbut as it explores the Kyle-Mike saga through funerals, a Thanksgiving celebration as well as the New Year's Eve trip to the ski slopes as well as a bachelor party weddings, it distinguishes its story in a variety of ways. In the first place, it divides the story into segments There's a lot of the pleasure of finding out what the characters are doing in their lives at the start of every new chapter, with every new episode bringing some interesting twists to the proceedings.
In addition, from the beginning tracking footage, The Climb is better constructed than the typical rough-and-tumble Indie (a fluid camera that glides between the inside and outside of a party at home is the apex) and is filled with musical moments and gravediggers performing straight-to-camera renditions of "I Shall Not Be Moved' or an Ukrainian group singing randomly in the snow gives the film a distinct texture and a distinct flavour.
However, the area where The Climb scores best is in its sharp portrayal of the shattered male friendship, which was written in stone during school. ("You guys were on a team," Kyle's dad, played by Cheers' George Wendt, says to Mike. "You were on playing on the fields, Kyle performing his trumpet"). The skewed dynamic — Mike is an alpha and Kyle an easygoing schlubperfectly etched. and is further enhanced when an old high-school acquaintance (Gayle Rankin) returns to the scene. It's a well-acted very well-observed rarityit's a US comedy in which the bromance feels authentic.
