A triumph of star-powered charm over a rocky script
The Mountain Between Us
12A cert, 112 min
Dir Hany Abu-assad. Starring
Kate Winslet, Idris Elba, Dermot Mulroney, Beau Bridges
In The Mountain Between Us, there ain’t no mountain high enough, no valley low enough, nor a script absurd enough, to keep Kate Winslet and Idris Elba from saving each other’s lives – or indeed, their movie. Romantically speaking, the best thing that ever happened to these two characters – total strangers who meet at Salt Lake City airport, urgently need to reschedule their cancelled flight, and join forces to charter one – is watching the affable pilot (Beau Bridges) suffer a perfectly timed stroke and send them plummeting into the Rockies.
At first, being stranded in freezing wilderness counts as a solid inconvenience. Alex (Winslet) is meant to be getting married the next day, and has no way to contact the groom. Dr Ben (Elba) is meant to be performing brain surgery on a 10-year-old. Walter, the pilot, dies. The passenger who preserves a reasonably sunny outlook is the latter’s golden retriever, which waddles around the fuselage of the crashed plane blissfully unaware that it’s just one bag of almonds and a few cookies away from being the only viable food source.
Remarkably light wounds, all things considered, enable these star-crossed travellers to hobble together on an icy trek to civilisation, during which time they bond, bicker and inch ever closer to sharing body warmth (the dog excluded).
Adapted from a surely horrendous novel by Charles Martin, the script, by Chris Weitz and J Mills Goodloe, is a kind of balsa-wood replica with a few toe-curling clangers lying in wait, especially when Ben’s job is broached to help them talk around their feelings. “The heart? It’s just a muscle,” we hear him demur, while flexing a few others.
Winslet’s likeability in extreme states of hypothermia, distress and emotional crisis has been more or less a given since Titanic, and she finally has the good sense here not to hog that wonky bit of flotsam all to herself.
At least as appealing is Elba. He looks excellent with fresh snow in his beard, aces the Sherpa-action-man requirements, and breezes his way through the cute banter with gravelly panache.
Shooting on real Canadian locations at -36F was arduous but worth it: if there’s one thing in this end-of-theearth fantasy that needs to strike us as non-negotiably authentic, it’s the scenery. The most surprising aspect, though, is who directed. Palestine’s Hany Abu-assad made his career with the Oscar-nominated Paradise Now, a heavy-hitting 2005 drama about the preparations of two suicide bombers. His desire to snuggle up to an audience is as palpable throughout as anything going on between Winslet and Elba, whose will-they-won’t-theynow-what relationship is sketched with broad strokes, but acted with rather tender ones.
It’s usually not wise to recommend tales of aerial disaster as in-flight entertainment, but this may well be the exception: if the consolation that awaits is anything like the fireside shut-ins and hot sex between these two, bring on the turbulence.