Jeff Goldblum Travels The Country Giving People Lobotomies in Trailer For THE MOUNTAIN
The first trailer has been released for a new indie film called The Mountain. The story is set in the 1950s and it centers around a young man (Tye Sheridan) who is hired by Jeff Goldblum to be his assistant as he travels to mental asylums around the country to perform lobotomies on patients.
While the subject matter and setting is extremely interesting, I wasn’t a fan of the film. I had a chance to see it when I was at Sundance earlier this year. I was actually very excited about seeing it for two reasons… the subject matter, which I’ve always found fascinating, and Jeff Goldblum. After all, who doesn’t love Jeff Goldblum!?
Well, unfortunately the movie wasn’t what I thought it would be and it turned out to be a super boring and uninteresting film, which is a shame. Here’s the synopsis:
1950s America. Since his mother’s confinement to an institution, Andy has lived in the shadow of his stoic father. A family acquaintance, Dr. Wallace Fiennes, employs the introverted young man as a photographer to document an asylum tour advocating for his increasingly controversial lobotomy procedure. As the tour progresses and Andy witnesses the doctor’s career and life unravel, he begins to identify with the institutions’ patients. Arriving at a California mountain town, a growing center of the New Age movement, they encounter an unconventional French healer who requests a lobotomy for his own daughter, Susan.
The movie was directed by Rick Alverson (Comedy). When talking about the film in an interview, he explained how the film is about constraints and limitations:
“A lot of my films are anti-Utopian because they are a counterweight to an overabundance of hyperbolic positive messages in cinema and the media, particularly in the US, that are all aspirational, that present a narrative of unlimited potential and boundless opportunities, things that are really vital for societies that are deprived of resources and hope. In cultures like the US and Europe, with an amount of privilege and a disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth and wellbeing, using these utopian narratives constantly in cinema or media and entertainment, there’s a surplus of that. It’s dangerous; it disconnects us from the world’s limitations, the fact that limitations make up everything around us, that they let us comprehend the beauty of the world but also our place in it, and without them, we become disconnected from things, we don’t understand anymore. The idiocy in the US of government people denying the global warming is real is a byproduct of this complete disconnect from the actuality and physicality of the world. It’s the narrative that we are unbound by these constraints. The film is about constraints and limitations.”
The Mountain will get a limited release on July 26th.