Film reviews round-up: The Mountain Between Us, The Glass Castle, The Reagan Show, On the Road

Grim peaks: in the film’s lesser moments, it’s as if Ben (Elba) and Alex (Winslet) are on an especially rugged, outward bound-style adventure holiday

The Mountain Between Us (12A)

★★☆☆☆

Dir. Hany Abu-Assad, 112 mins, starring: Kate Winslet, Idris Elba, Dermot Mulroney, Beau Bridges, Lucia Walters, Waleed Zuaiter

There’s something about love and disaster that seems to attract Kate Winslet. Twenty years after her encounter with Leonardo DiCaprio and an iceberg in Titanic, she is suffering (and smouldering) again in sub-zero temperatures in the very mushy, snowbound romantic drama/survival saga, The Mountain Between Us. This time, she’s in a plane crash in a remote wilderness somewhere on the way to Denver where her character, American photographer/journalist Alex Knox, is due to get married the next day.

Alex and surgeon Dr Ben Bass (Idris Elba) are strangers who are stranded when their flight is cancelled at short notice. Both are desperate to get home. It’s Alex’s idea to charter a little twin engine plane to take them to Denver. The pilot (Beau Bridges) is on the elderly side and isn’t very good at spotting storms. We know the moment they board the little plane that it’s bound to crash.

Elba, Winslet and their Dutch-Palestinian director Hany Abu-Asad (Oscar nominated for both Paradise Now and Omar) are heavyweights in a very lightweight vehicle. It’s a mystery as to why they signed up for a project as novelettish as this one.

Like the two survivors in their story, the filmmakers struggle to work out just how to cope with the situation in which they find themselves. On the one hand, this is a heady love story about a man and a woman brought together in the most unlikely circumstances. On the other, it’s an existential study in the vein of Touching the Void or 127 Hours or even Alive exploring how far human beings will go in extreme circumstances to stay alive.

Ben and Alex are on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. They’ve got a few candy bars, cookies and almonds. Alex has hurt her foot badly in the crash. Ben has survived with bruises and a couple of cracked ribs. Alex ventures, not altogether helpfully, that they should be able to survive “three weeks without water, three days without food and three minutes without air.” At first, they can’t work out whether they should stick together in the fuselage of the plane, where they are at least warm, or whether Ben should venture off on his own in search of help.

The old saw about the danger of working with animals rings very true here. Elba and Winslet are continually upstaged by the dead pilot’s labrador. Whatever angst they are feeling, the dog is relentlessly cheerful and keeps on wagging its tail throughout. Nothing upsets it. Neither the death of its original owner, nor the prospect that it might be put on the grill when the cookies and almonds run out nor being savaged by a cougar bother the dog at all. It bounds cheerily through the snow.

This is a love story that starts in the most unpromising circumstances. Winslet’s Alex is so badly injured that she can’t even take off her own trousers when she needs to pee. She can barely walk. That doesn’t affect her sense of aesthetics or her journalistic opportunism. At the most dangerous points in the narrative, she will always find time to take a picture. Director Abu-Asad shares her instincts, throwing in plenty of picturesque shots of the snow-covered mountain tops and the cobalt blue skies or the spectacular forests and waterfalls.

For almost the entire film, no one else other than Winslet and Elba (and the scene-stealing dog) is on screen. At first, the doctor and the journalist are cooped up in the wrecked plane. Then they go cross-country.

Alongside the harshness of the battle for survival, there are fairy tale-like elements. More than once, Alex is treated as a Sleeping Beauty-like figure. When she is hurt or in a coma, Dr Ben will look after her so attentively that she is always coaxed back to life. On their epic journey down the mountain, they always seem to find romantic little caves or cabins where they can spend quality time together. They may utter trite likes like “the heart is just a muscle,” but it is obvious to us, if not to them, that they are falling in love.

In the film’s lesser moments, it’s as if Ben and Alex are on an especially rugged, outward bound-style adventure holiday. For all their suffering, they seem half to enjoy the isolation. (If rescue parties are searching for them, they’re making a very bad job of it.) The screenplay (by Chris Weitz and J Mills Goodloe) makes references to their hunger and suffering – but they never look as if they are in quite as much discomfort as they should be. Beyond the battle for survival, the filmmakers struggle to find much in the way of dramatic tension. The more time the two main characters spend together, the more they begin to resemble an old married couple. She goes through his things and listens to tape recordings from what appears to be his ex-wife. He complains about her stubbornness and recklessness.

Elba and Winslet are strong enough actors to be able to stop the film from slipping completely down the ravine and into sugary melodrama. Nonetheless, the final section is contrived and manipulative in the extreme. The last scenes are the most excruciating. You won’t find any of the political nuance or emotional complexity that distinguish the director’s earlier films made in the Middle East. The real disappointment here is how conventional the storytelling becomes and how little the two leads are challenged in anything other than the most obvious way. The one surprise is that we don’t get to hear Celine Dion over the closing credits.

The Glass Castle (12A)

★★☆☆☆

Dir. Destin Daniel Cretton, 127 mins, starring: Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Sarah Snook, Naomi Watts, Max Greenfield

The Glass Castle is adapted from Jeannette Walls’ best-selling memoir about her nomadic and bizarre childhood. Walls’ parents were colourful, wildly unconventional and often downright negligent and cruel. The film’s portrayal of them is contradictory in the extreme. They are inspirational one moment and utterly despicable the next. We’re therefore never quite sure whether this is a chronicle of family abuse or a tribute to a couple who defied the normal rules of parenthood. Many viewers are likely to become even more exasperated by the antics of Rex Walls (Woody Harrelson) and his artist wife Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) than their own long-suffering children.

The structure doesn’t help. This is a film full of random flashbacks and flashforwards in which the tone of the storytelling fluctuates wildly. We first encounter Jeanette (played as an adult by Brie Larson) as a successful New York magazine gossip journalist, contemplating marriage to Wall Street-type accountant David (Max Greenfield.) She’s sophisticated and cosmopolitan. That’s why she is not at all keen to stop her taxi home after a dinner when she spots “mum and dad digging through trash downtown”.

In the early flashbacks, Jeanette’s childhood seems idyllic in its own harum-scarum way. The family is always on the road, always up to high jinks.

Rex is a visionary type who doesn’t believe in conventional, bourgeois behaviour. He drives his family across America, always one step ahead of his creditors. They set up new homes wherever they go and he talks about building them a glass castle. There are references to his background as a pilot. Rex is a renaissance man who knows astronomy, physics, architecture and engineering. He is a free-spirited maverick who likes the family to spend time under the stars. “You learn from living and everything else is a damn lie” is his motto. He’s the type of dad who’ll teach a young child to swim by throwing her in the water and then leaving her to work out how not to drown. He howls like a wolf so the kids know he is around.

For her part, Rose Mary is an artist who thinks it is far more important for her to finish her latest painting than to feed the kids.

One of the frustrations here is that director and co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton withholds so much information. It is never really explained where Rex’s learning comes from or why he has adopted such an anarchic way of life. Only slowly do we learn that he is a bullying and sexist alcoholic with a very mean streak who always sponges off others.

Janette doesn’t have much luck with the menfolk in her life. The reason, it is hinted, that she is so drawn to the accountant David is that he is so different to her father, a solvent, dependable and very conventional figure who happens to be rich. As played by Greenfield, he is also irredeemably smug and unctuous.

Three different actresses portray Janette. She is played as a very young child by Chandler Head. The strongest scenes in the film by far are those featuring Janette when she is a little older, on the verge of adolescence. Brilliantly played by Ella Anderson, she is precocious, defiant but also very vulnerable. She has nothing to compare her family to or any sense of what constitutes “normality.” Taking her father’s advice about “learning from living,” she gradually begins to work out how hellish her childhood actually is.

Harrelson gives a powerful but not especially sympathetic performance as the family patriarch. The Glass Castle would surely have worked better if Rex was more ingratiating and charismatic. We would then be better able to understand why the children so admired him and why they tolerated his excesses. Harrelson captures Rex’s energy, machismo and intelligence but he’s never very likeable or charming. There is a very telling moment in which the young Janette is so startled by his behaviour that she shields her eyes and can’t even watch him.

The film always wants to have it both ways – to paint Rex as the villain of Janette’s childhood but also as her greatest inspiration. He’s “extremely cruel” but (she says) he “dreams bigger than anyone I’ve ever met”. The double dealing becomes less and less convincing. In the middle part of the film, his behaviour becomes progressively nastier. There are token efforts to explain the roots of his malice. His own hillbilly mother was very cruel too – and possibly even sexually abused him. Nonetheless, he is so unpleasant that we fully understand why Janette drives on by when she sees him rummaging around in the trash.

Having gone to great lengths to demonise Rex, the filmmakers spend much of the last part of the movie rehabilitating him and trying to convince us that maybe he wasn’t such a bad sort after all. He proudly kept a scrapbook of Janette’s achievements. It is hinted that his cruelty toward her may have been calculated as a way of making her tough and independent. Of course, by then, it is far too late for such special pleading. We’ve seen too much of his abusive behaviour at first hand. What we are left with is a family saga which is far more dispiriting than uplifting and which often makes very grim viewing.

The Reagan Show (PG)

★★★☆☆

Dir. Sierra Pettengill, Pacho Velez, 74 mins, features: Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush

You can hardly blame archive-based documentary The Reagan Show for being superficial. Its subject is a US President whose defining trait was his superficiality. In much of the footage here, Ronald Reagan comes across a little like Peter Sellers’ Chance, the gardener, in Hal Ashby’s satire Being There. He makes bland remarks in a very engaging way. You can’t help but like him even when, on the evidence here, he has little practical grasp of policy detail. His vagueness was his shield.

There’s a wonderful moment when he apologises for one of the biggest scandals of his time in the White House, namely the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages affair. He’s like a forgetful old uncle trying to explain how he lost his spectacles. “A few months ago, I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not,” Reagan blithely admits a whopper of a lie.

The most telling moment comes early on when he is asked whether his background in Hollywood has been “useful” to him as a politician. “There have been times in this office when I’ve wondered how you can do the job if you hadn’t been an actor,” Reagan replies. It’s an unusual answer in that he seems to have come up with it himself and made it off the cuff. (Most of his other responses seem very tightly scripted.)

Compared to Trump, Reagan is courteous and sympathetic. He lived, as one observer puts it, “in a world of Norman Rockwell and Reader’s Digest”. Whether meeting Mr T from The A Team or striking a groundbreaking arms treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, his folksy demeanour is always the same. His aides always try to arrange it so that he doesn’t have to answer questions from the press. “A speech, a wave and a smile” were his magic formula as he hurried off out of the journalists’ range. If the media was giving him an especially hard time, he could always rely on his beloved wife Nancy to march into a press conference with a birthday cake to distract them.

The Reagan Show doesn’t tell us much about Reagan that we didn’t already know. It reminds us what a limited and one-dimensional politician he was – but also what a consummate performer whenever the cameras were in sight.

On The Road (15)

★★★☆☆

Dir. Michael Winterbottom, 121 mins, starring: Ellie Rowsell, James McArdle, Leah Harvey, Jamie Quinn, Shirley Henderson, Paul Popplewell

Michael Winterbottom is the most prolific British filmmaker of his generation, a director who’ll turn his hand to every kind of movie but whose work always retains its personal stamp. Now in his mid-50s, he has made On The Road, a documentary with fictional elements in which youth is foregrounded. The film follows London indie rock band Wolf Alice on a tour across Britain. There is something vampiric about the way Winterbottom preys on his twentysomething protagonists. He is clearly smitten by the band’s singer-songwriter Ellie Rowsell, a charismatic and articulate figure with a dynamic stage presence. She named the band after one of Angela Carter’s stories in her book Bloody Chamber.

It is very difficult to capture the energy of live musical performance on film but that’s something Winterbottom and his collaborators excel in. The concert footage here is shot in lithe, imaginative fashion, giving us the perspective of the band and the spectators.

The fictional element concerns Estelle (Leah Harvey), a young woman from “management” who joins the tour bus and eventually begins a relationship with Joe (James McCardle), a laidback and charming Scottish roadie. There’s also a short scene involving one of Winterbottom’s favourite actresses Shirley Henderson, who plays Joe’s alcoholic mum, encountered in a Glasgow bar.

You won’t find much Spinal Tap humour here but what Winterbottom does capture is the camaraderie of the touring group as well as the exhaustion and exhilaration of life on the road. He pays plenty of attention to the everyday logistics of touring – how you wash, how you get to sleep in the bunks on the tour bus and the etiquette of bathroom use. He films the band giving interviews to journalists and local radio stations, who always seem to ask them to play acoustic versions of their songs. The filmmaker is an invisible presence. This isn’t one of those documentaries in which he becomes part of the group. On a formal level, this is a subtle and clever piece of work. You can’t help but wonder just how Winterbottom and his crew achieved such access and were able to film such intimate moments without intruding on them. An added benefit of using the dramatic elements is that the film has more of a storyline than the conventional rock doc.