LOST ON A MOUNTAIN IN MAINE - Mark Reviews Movies

Lost on a Mountain in Maine, Blue Fox Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 31, 2024

The disappearance of Donn Fendler, a 12-year-old boy, on Mount Katahdin became big news when it happened in July of 1939. His story might have gained some longevity, too, if not for fact that other, far more significant events in world history were on the horizon. The absence of general knowledge about Fendler's tale in the wilderness is a benefit to the makers of Lost on a Mountain in Maine, however, because the specifics of what happened and the result of the boy's disappearance aren't, well, common knowledge.

Of course, we suspect or strongly expect how this story will turn out, since most filmmakers don't seek out tales of terrible tragedy about which to make movies. Luke Paradise's screenplay kind of gets ahead of those suspicions and expectations, though, by making this more a story about a family than one detailing each and every step of the boy's efforts to survive. It's dramatic, not on account of what the kid does, but because there's an emotional core to why it's so vital to so many people that the boy is rescued.

Much of that revolves around the relationship between Donn, played by Luke David Blumm, and his father Donald, played by Paul Sparks. The two have a tenuous relationship when we first meet them, since Donald has to travel for long stretches away from home to find work and keep supporting his family in the midst of the Great Depression. Donn understands this, obviously, but it doesn't mean he wants his father gone for so long.

The father, meanwhile, has become hardened by the family's financial struggles, and recently, that means he wants his oldest sons, Donn and his twin brother Ryan (Griffin Wallace Henkel), to comprehend that the world is tough. He has become tougher with the boys to prepare them for that reality.

Both the boy and the man, though, are stubborn and prone to some degree of anger because of all of this. They're too much alike, really, to much get along anymore. When Donn runs off from the hiking party after getting into a fight with his brother over their father, both the son, who becomes lost in the dense forest, and the father, who starts looking for his son almost nonstop, realize how much they actually mean to each other. These two central performances are engaging in the ways the actors gradually reveal how much regret is behind the difficult father-son relationship.

When it's focused on that, director Andrew Boodhoo Kightlinger's gets at something more and deeper than some flat, fact-based survival story. The filmmakers, though, seem intent on making the dry facts the real core of this movie. This is not just in how the characters sometimes talk, as if they're explaining what's happening for the sake of posterity, and the expanse of details that don't necessarily need to be explained. It's also in the very form of the movie.

Kightlinger takes on a docudrama approach, using archival interviews from real family members, friends, and people who were involved in the search for the Fendler boy. There's no context for when these interviews were recorded, although it must have been several decades after the incident, as well as several decades ago, since most, if not all, of the subjects of those interviews would be dead by now.

Could Kightlinger have assembled an actual documentary from these interviews and other archival footage that plays during the end credits? That's always the question of such movies, but in this case, the question is constantly put right in front of us. Considering how often the interviews drive the narrative or add some degree of tension, it certainly seems as if the director might have wanted to make a documentary.

The technique becomes something of a hindrance to the actual drama of this fictionalized account. The filmmakers find some way to make us involved in the dramatization, with these performances and the attention on how the family is affected by the boy's disappearance, only to interrupt the flow of it with an interview clip from one of the real people. If the filmmakers trust the strength of their version, why do they feel compelled to support it with the interviews? If the interviews are so vital to understanding the real story, what's the purpose of this dramatization in the first place?

Whatever the thinking behind this narrative tactic, the movie is still effective when it does trust its ability to tell this story—as drama and on its own terms. Again, it possesses those performances from Sparks and Blumm, as well as from Caitlin FitzGerald as the boy's mother Ruth, who starts enlisting help wherever she can find it and finds her only bit of hope in knowing just how stubborn her son is. In between the scenes of Donn facing physical pain and dealing with despair and discovering just how unforgiving the world can be, we get a sense of this family, and it grounds the whole thing in a practical, sometimes affecting way.

It's almost enough for Lost on a Mountain in Maine to succeed, but the filmmakers get in their own way with the reliance on those real-life interviews, which are also presented and edited in a slightly disingenuous way that keeps the story's resolution at bay. The whole technique ultimately feels like a trick that doesn't work.

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