Arriving with little fanfare — it won the Coup de Coeur prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival — The Climb is a treat. Written by and starring real-life friends Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino (who also directs), it’s a treatise on a toxic male friendship played out over seven segments and a number of years. Leaning heavily into Marvin and Covino’s actual friendship, it’s a film that deals with the lengths (and depths) men go to preserve the sanctity of their bond in low-key, funny and surprising ways.
The film’s first segment started life as an eight-minute short and it’s a perfectly formed comedy skit in itself, self-contained enough to be satisfying yet with sufficient seeds of story and character to be developed in the next six episodes. It starts with former high school jock Mike (Covino) and good-natured mensch Kyle (Marvin) cycling uphill in picturesque France. The exhausting activity is part of a stag do to mark Kyle’s impending wedding to Ava (Judith Godrèche), which Mike grabs as the perfect opportunity to inform Kyle that he has been sleeping with Ava for three years. The comedy comes from Kyle’s indignation tempered by tiredness (Kyle: “If I catch you, I’m going to kill you.” Mike: “That’s why I waited for the hill”) and is beautifully enhanced by punctuation marks (a team of pro cyclists speeding by adds a perfect pause in the argument) and the camera covering the action in one long take, finding sly comedy in the changing distances between the two friends.
A well-played, minutely observed rarity.
On paper, The Climb sounds like traditional Sundance fodder – a talky dissection of relationships with actors you’ve never heard of — but as it continues to explore the Kyle-Mike buddydom through funerals, a Thanksgiving party, a New Year’s Eve skiing trip, a bachelor party and a wedding, it distinguishes itself in numerous ways. Firstly, in dividing the story into episodes, there’s fun to be had figuring out where the characters are in their lives in each new chapter, each new segment adding a nifty twist on proceedings.
Secondly, from the sustained opening tracking shot, The Climb is better made than your standard scrappy indie (a fluid camera gliding inside and outside of a house party is the high point) and dotted with moments of musical grace; a group of gravediggers giving a straight to camera rendition of ‘I Shall Not Be Moved’ or a Ukrainian choir randomly singing in the snow give the film a texture and flavour all its own.
But where The Climb scores best is in its pin-sharp portrayal of a gone-wrong male friendship that was cast in stone at school (“You guys were a team,” Kyle’s dad, played by Cheers’ George Wendt, tells Mike. “You on the field, Kyle playing the trumpet”). The imbalanced dynamic — Mike’s an alpha, Kyle an easy-going schlub — is perfectly etched, exacerbated when an old high-school friend (Gayle Rankin) comes back on the scene. The result is a well-played, minutely observed rarity — a US comedy where the bromance actually feels real.