The Climb, Michael Angelo Corvino‘s feature-length debut, is an expansion on an earlier short he made a few years back of the same title. In that short, we find Mike (Corvino) and his best friend Kyle (Kyle Marvin) cycling through a picturesque environment, with Kyle having just undergone a breakup with his then girlfriend. Mike, needing to get things off his chest, reveals to Kyle that he’d also been sleeping with her. The short is more or less a study of empathy while being executed as one long take. The feature length version takes the short, more or less verbatim, with one key change and then expands upon the journey of these two men and the contraction and regrowth of their friendship.
On paper, The Climb is an admirable effort, as it expresses a sense of limitless, yet grounded ambition in its own reality, in as much as its willing to take its characters in a number of flexible situations from sequence to sequence. In one segment we’re following the pair at Mike’s wife’s funeral, at another, we hold witness to Mike’s struggles with alcoholism as he collapses at Kyle’s family’s Christmas party, and another sees them on a ski trip with Kyle’s new girlfriend (Gayle Rankin), and it goes on and on. Narrative unpredictability indeed a selling point, at least in an initial viewing. Curiously enough though, Corvino also adapts the visual affectation of the short, as each scene is formulated around the one-take gimmick throughout. So, in a way, it’s like we’re watching a collection of mundane 1917s.
Again, when written out, that sounds fairly exciting, and at times, The Climb has its moments of interest, particularly in the early going. When we’re first introduced to this hapless pair, there’s a strain of awkward humor that’s fairly indebted to the “mumblecore” movement of decades past, and in these initial scenes, it mostly works. Outside of the first bike ride upon which everything else is built, the subsequent funeral scene feels like a subsequent elevation of the film’s usage of spatial awareness. Where the bike ride is vast, yet sparse, the funeral is constrained while being packed with a number of people whom Corvino shifts and sways from the camera’s gaze.
Sadly, from those heights, the film hits a bit of a proverbial wall. With each scene lessening in its impact as each successive situation unfolds in front of the audience. Partially, the issue is that its technical approach starts to feel at odds with the material. The purpose of the single shot approach makes absolute sense in following two cyclists, but it starts to feel extraneous at family parties. Less an experience than just an exercise in being voyeuristic, and after a while it even starts to get in the way of some elements of storytelling clarity in just a subtle enough fashion to mar the experience. This is also compounded by a much simpler problem; the material just gets weaker as each segment ticks off. The Climb, just by its nature, gets a unique opportunity to hit the reset button as each chapter reaches its climax: if you don’t like what you’re watching currently, there’s a good chance what follows it could deeply improve your experience. Sadly, it doesn’t at all work to the film’s advantage, as each shunt forward in time displays an ever growing weaker sense of narrative inertia. Characters stand around and say things, but the spark that lit up its earliest set-ups completely dies down in its final third. The characters aren’t just intolerable, which is probably the point, they’re just boring, and offer little beyond what the first 20 minutes of the film already proffered. Heck, half of the duo barely has any characterization at all, a cypher to bounce off of the more complex lead/filmmaker.
The Climb is a strange experience, its own concept and camera pizazz gives off a sense of the exciting and the unique, but it quickly becomes deadening as it comes to show it only has so many ideas to cycle through. It really should have stayed a short subject.
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