Mark Reviews Movies: THE CLIMB (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 12, 2020

Each of us might want a friendship like the one between the main characters in The Climb, and all of us would dread the possibility that a friend is anything like either of these guys. That's the way it goes, though. We get to choose our friends, but after a long enough time, you can't choose simply to abandon a friend. That's the great and sometimes awful thing about it.

You can tell this film was made by real friends. It was written by and stars Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin, with Covino also directing the film with considerable skill. It's about two guys, named Mike and Kyle (Does it have to stated who plays whom?), and the course of the characters' friendship over the passage of several years.

Kyle gets engaged twice, and twice, Mike ends up sleeping with his best friend's fiancée—for a completely different reason each time. You'd think that would kill their bond, and for a while each time, it almost does. Again, after a certain point, a person can't just choose to abandon a friend, even if it seems like the most obvious and only choice available.

One could use plenty of words to describe this relationship, especially as Mike and particularly Kyle keep going back to each other after so much betrayal and animosity, and a good number those words wouldn't be positive. They keep going back, though, and that's the only thing that matters. It tells us everything we know need to about these men and their friendship.

The film is structured as seven chapters, and each chapter possesses at minimum two lengthy shots. The first chapter, for example, watches Mike and Kyle on a bike ride somewhere in France. The camera follows them together, follows one, pulls back away from the pair when things get heated, and then revolves around a fight that breaks out—not between the buddies, but between Mike and a random driver, who dares to honk at the two when they're taking up an entire lane of the road.

Mike is the one with the temper, which is ironically amusing, because it's Kyle who probably should under the circumstances. He's about to marry a woman named Ava (Judith Godrèche), whom he loves deeply and about whom he cannot stop talking. That's when Mike, seemingly out of the blue, breaks the bad news: He and Ava slept together.

The structure of the resulting dialogue is simply great. Kyle is upset and a little disgusted, although he assumes it was just a one-time thing. Mike corrects him: It was multiple times. He assures him that it was before she and Kyle were dating. Kyle slowly comes to accept it, and that's when the bad news gets worse. The affair was also happening while Kyle and Ava were together. Mike has to get this off his chest, because he loves her, too, especially—a detail he really, really doesn't have to mention (Kyle points out that she's his fiancée, so he definitely knows about it)—"the hip thing" she does.

The rest of the film unfolds in extended vignettes such as this one. The highlights include the next one, when Mike is at the funeral for his wife/Kyle's ex-fiancée (It goes more poorly than one could imagine, with Mike getting into a physical fight over union rules), and a pair of holidays, when a newly engaged Kyle learns at Thanksgiving that Mike has been invited to Christmas. By the way, the staging of this scene, a single and seemingly unbroken long take, is subtly brilliant, as time passes in a flash from one holiday to the next without a cut. It's as if time stands still, even as it's progressing inevitably forward. In a way, that's kind of like this friendship, too.

There's also a ski trip, when Mike decides to sabotage Kyle's engagement to Marissa (Gayle Rankin) because he thinks she's bad for Kyle, and we get a most awkward wedding, which seems to hit rock bottom before we remember that the concept of rock bottom is completely relative. There's always plenty of fall before the bottom.

These guys have a lot of falling to do. Kyle, played by Marvin with a quiet passivity that's equally endearing and infuriating (That's clearly the point), is like putty, being constantly crushed by the world but repeatedly re-taking its shape. He's a nice guy—too nice by just about everyone's account—and cannot say no (There's a very funny scene in which Marissa tries to teach him how, and the payoff, as he looks for his new fiancée's acceptance when he tries it for real for the first time, is a fine joke and a finer piece of character development).

Meanwhile, Mike falls into despair and alcohol abuse following the death of Ava, but that doesn't stop him from trying to sabotage Kyle's life as much as he's sabotaging his own. The success of Angelo's performance is in how we just can't bring ourselves to detest this guy. Mike is brash and impulsive and seems to have no concept that his actions affect other people, but there's genuine pain and a belief that he's doing the right thing beneath that exterior.

There are more details and sequences, too, filled with exceptional dialogue, always finding a sense of naturalism in words and rhythm, and plenty of humor, always with an underlying sense of pathos about how these two guys are both perfect and absolutely unsuited for each other. Covino's single-take strategy isn't just trickery to show off, as impressive as it often is. There's reason—so that we can focus almost exclusively on the dialogue and performances—and rhyme—so that we notice how jokes and various character moments match each other within a scene or across other chapters—behind it.

The whole relationship progresses along a series of downs, with multiple reconciliations kept off-screen, until a single, everyday scene, once again involving bikes, finds the sole, undoubtable up upon which to define this bond. It's kind of beautiful, really—just as the friendship in The Climb, as shaky and terrible and painful as it can be, is, too.

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