The Mountain Between Us
“The Mountain Between Us” is the story of a man and woman stranded in the snowy mountains following a plane crash. It’s freezing out there and looks it. There’s panic and boredom and a sense of hopelessness, and you can almost feel all of it. Watching this movie is practically like being there.
So that’s the achievement of “The Mountain Between Us.” It’s also the problem. Do you want to be stuck in the freezing cold, without much hope of rescue? Probably not. But how does the prospect sound of watching fictional characters in the same predicament? OK, well, that might have possibilities, so long as the situation were exciting, not just agonizing and bleak; and if the interaction of the characters were so compelling that the movie began to seem more like a story about these particular individuals and not just their situation.
Ultimately, “The Mountain Between Us” tries to pull the audience’s interest in a relationship direction. It’s a difficult task, despite two charismatic leads, Idris Elba and Kate Winslet. Winslet is Alex, a photojournalist on the way home from a photo shoot, and Elba is Ben, a neurosurgeon traveling across the country to perform an operation. Both need to get to Denver, but their commercial flights have been delayed, and so Alex approaches Ben — to this point a stranger — and asks him to go half with her in chartering a small plane.
The charter pilot, played by Beau Bridges, turns out to be a breezy, confident older fellow, so breezy he doesn’t bother to register a flight plan, and so old that . . . well, put it this way: If the Academy had a category for best simulated stroke while flying a small plane, Bridges would be a shooin for the Oscar.
The plane crash interrupts the characters’ projected story lines, which are agreeable, albeit separate. So that when Alex and Ben find themselves stranded in the snow, it’s not just disappointing for them, but for the audience as well. They know they have an ordeal ahead, but we know something, too, and that’s that virtually nothing can happen for the rest of the movie until they’re rescued. We also know, with a certain grim inevitability, that in this type of movie, rescues take a long time to arrive.
From then on, it’s just a story about two people trying to stay alive, although the movie would have us experience “The Mountain Between Us” as something else, as a story about two people getting to know each other — and coming into a deeper understanding of themselves — as a result of this crisis. The only problem with that is that the audience doesn’t quite receive the events of the movie as a crisis, but rather as a calamity, which shoves aside all other considerations besides survival.
In pushing for emotional effects, the film ends up flirting with sentimentality. That’s not good in itself; but even worse, it provides something of a sappy frame for the scenes of physical hardship, such that some moments that are supposed to seem harrowing actually end up unintentionally funny — kind of like a piano falling on Oliver Hardy.
Still, this is Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, and if you give them something, anything, to work with, they’ll come back with something human, fleshed out and worthwhile. In the case of “The Mountain Between Us,” we end up liking the characters very much, and caring about them, even if we simultaneously are not remotely in love with the movie. It’s also worth noting that, unlike most films, “The Mountain Between Us” finishes strong, with the film’s best stretch coming in the last 20 minutes.