Comedies are few and far between in Cannes’ usually somber line-up, so for many festival-goers, “The Climb” is a refreshing change of pace. Compartmentalized into six tidy vignettes, sometimes spaced years apart, Michael Angelo Covino’s directorial debut follows two average joes Kyle (Kyle Marvin) and Mike (Covino himself) as they chart the rocky course of their friendship from one feud to the next.
READ MORE: 2019 Cannes Film Festival: The 21 Most Anticipated Movies
Unlike other buddy comedies of its genre, though, the plot structure of “The Climb” is more accurately charted as a series of sequential peaks, rather than building to one easily-defined climax. The film’s compact opening sequence efficiently presents Kyle and Mike’s volatile friendship in microcosm. As Kyle and Mike cycle up a steep hillside trail in Nice — Kyle arduously straining to get in shape for his pending marriage to Ava (Judith Godreche), while Mike, a limber cyclist, pedals with ease — when suddenly, Mike drops the bombshell that he slept with Kyle’s fiancée. In rapid succession, Covino escalates both strains of tension — the progressively more strenuous bike ride alongside the heated argument — heightening stakes even further when Mike gets into fisticuffs with a French driver.
READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2019
With each vignette, Covino raises the bar. Mike’s short temper, as well as Kyle’s passivity, become two relevant throughlines of the film, which follows Mike through a depressive bout of personal loss and weight gain. Meanwhile, Kyle ill-advisedly reunites with his high school girlfriend Marissa (Gayle Rankin), whose merits shine brightest, to quote Mike, “when you weren’t being yourself.” This kind of deadpan comedy becomes par for the course in the film’s dialogue.
READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2019
Covino and co-scriptwriter Marvin prove to be a powerful real-life duo, alternately punctuating their screenplay with enlivening comedic bursts and generally inventive narrative turns (albeit, with a few predictable exceptions, like a slip through the ice during an episode of ice-fishing).
READ MORE: The 25 Best Films Of 2019 We’ve Already Seen
Yet behind the deadpan, visual gags, and slapstick, Covino and DP Zach Kuperstein possess a keen cinephile’s eye, which is what makes “The Climb” eligible for a festival of Cannes’ caliber. (Covino even manages to slip in a reference to Pierre Étaix’s 1969 “Le Grand Amour.”) Long Steadicam shots move fluidly through multi-room scenes, visually elevating “The Climb” to a level above a run-of-the-mill raunchy comedy.
There’s the sense that the titular climb is not solely about height, but also depth. Kuperstein’s Steadicam produces the feeling of continuously plunging further and further into the scene, particularly during a Thanksgiving-to-Christmas sequence at Kyle’s family house, which erupts in quiet, passive-aggressive fits. Snatches of dialogue belie a complexly and thoroughly imagined world, with its own lattice of relationships and discord, with tension to be found at every nexus. Kyle’s extended family, from catty sisters to absentminded grandpa, contributes spectacularly in this regard. Covino adds a spotlight on Kyle’s mother (Talia Balsam), whose well-meaning advice to Mike is later comically mistranslated.
In short, the driving factor of Covino’s relentlessly funny, affecting comedy is neither cinematographic ingenuity, nor its tongue-in-cheek facetiousness, though these elements surely help. No, what’s most persuasive about Kyle and Mike is, simply put, Kyle and Mike themselves. Covino’s attentiveness to the intensely human factor, to the strangely magnetic pull between these two buddies, keeps a recursive narrative from ever going stale. They begin the film as tropes, to be sure: the schlubby nice guy and the obnoxious schmuck, already an established comedy duo in the tradition of Laurel and Hardy. Yet with Kyle and Mike, monikers so plain they sonically match, each raises the other above the level of archetype to something better, more specific, more endearing. In line with the last vignette’s title, their cartoonish antics aren’t simply the shenanigans of sitcom character types, but two men learning to grow up with and for each other. Surprisingly, that’s the greatest romance there is. [A-]
