ON SCREEN She saw

ONE MARRIAGE, TWO REVIEWS Argumentative married couple Greg Bruce Zanna Gillespie review The Climb and

He saw

I often “joke” with Zanna about sitting in the back row at the cinema and making out. She has never once laughed, nor has she ever agreed, so I was surprised and delighted to find, as we entered Rialto Cinema 5 on Friday night, that we had been assigned seats in an otherwise empty back row. I made a joke about making out. She ignored it.

She has explicitly asked me more than once not to write about making out, because her parents and other family members read these reviews and, although they’ve met and even cared for our three children, they don’t know where they came from.

An hour and 15 minutes into the movie, by which time I had been bored for an hour, I leaned over to kiss her. She recoiled and gave me a look of such pure contempt that I mentally went home, packed my bags and moved in with friends who said I could stay as long as I needed, before telling me days later that my presence was interfering with their sex life.

I apologised to Zanna and returned to disliking the movie. A couple of days later, when I mentioned I had found her rejection of my advances quite hurtful, she said, “Were you trying to make out with me? I had no idea.”

One of the many fundamental personality differences between me and my wife is grit. Take film reviewing: Right now, I guarantee she’s sitting at our dining room table, in front of her computer, head cocked to the left, feet up on a chair, mentally wrestling with difficult issues like thematic dissonance, the value of singleshot scenes, musical interludes and so on, while I sit here writing about how rejection hurts my feelings.

What is there to say about The Climb? Guy falls in love with best friend’s fiancee, she dies, things get steadily worse until the end, at which point there’s a bike-riding scene. There are long single-shot scenes and incongruous musical interludes, which are not uninteresting but ultimately the movie is undone by thematic dissonance and apart from that it’s boring. It would be a good movie in which to make out, although that’s a claim for which I have been able to gather no evidence.

I found The Climb to be pleasant viewing, at least until about two-thirds of the way through when Greg started giving off intense 3-yearold-who-needs-to-go-to-the-toilet energy. He was fidgety and would lean in to make comments — something he consistently berates me for at home — but then not say anything. In retrospect, he may not have been leaning in to chat.

The film’s a comedy about a friendship between two men — writers/actors Michael Corvino and Kyle Marvin — which persists despite a gross betrayal: Mike has an affair with Kyle’s fiancee. The opening scene, in which Mike fesses up to this carnal sin, is one long shot of the two mountain-biking in France. It’s a charming introduction to these two characters and an excellent set-up for comedy to ensue. There are many great scenes thereafter, with keen observations about romantic relationships, loyalty, grief and depression, as well as delightfully abstract musical interludes such as a ski ballet and comedic pole dance.

It is, however, lacking the one thing that Greg claims to hate about Hollywood cinema: a predictable narrative arc. It’s a sequence of events in the course of their friendship over a number of years and major life events which, strung together, create a collage of their relationship without an immediately clear meaning beyond the resiliency of friendship. If you’ve read any of Greg’s previous rants about formulaic movie-making, you’d be forgiven for thinking this break from conventional high stakes story structure might appeal to him. As his wife and most frequent listener to aforementioned rants, I wasn’t surprised he missed the very thing he has relentlessly ridiculed. He loves a soapbox and is willing to die on it, even as it buckles beneath him.

On the car ride home, having enjoyed the movie despite my jiggly date, I recalled something my screenwriting teacher often said: “Just because it happened in real life doesn’t make it a good movie.” Real life, a bit like this film, is a continuous stream of happenings that often have no clear meaning and rarely build to anything other than death. And while I couldn’t find any evidence the film was based on Corvino and Marvin’s real lives, it had a sort of meandering real-life quality.

It’s an off-beat portrait of male friendship that left me feeling a little unsatisfied / searching for more meaning, but was nevertheless pleasurable viewing. Greg is a man who’s hard to entertain, and that’s not The Climb’s fault.

The Climb is in cinemas now.