Distributors are smart to emphasize the presence of Jeff Goldblum in The Mountain. In this somber, 1950s-set drama—the fifth feature from Spokane-born director Rick Alverson—Goldblum plays a lobotomist struggling to keep his career going as the procedure falls out of favor. While The Mountain possesses an oppressive elegance, there’s little to appeal to a mainstream audience apart from his performance as a very ordinary ghoul: a dyspeptic, soft-spoken intellectual whose rumpled charm dissolves virtually every night into drunken lust and self-pity. As Dr. Wallace Fiennes, based on the real-life psychiatrist Walter Freeman, Goldblum tamps down the silver-foxy mischief of his media persona to portray the embitterment of an irrelevant male.
Fiennes isn’t actually the main character in the film. The Mountain follows Andy (Tye Sheridan), a practically inert young man who’s lost his mother to the asylum and his father (Udo Kier) to a sudden death. Andy agrees to accompany Fiennes, his mother’s disgraced former doctor, on a road trip to different mental institutions where the lobotomist can still practice his trade. Nearly silent and perpetually dour, passed from father figure to father figure without protest, Andy is a mystery—a fact that speaks to Sheridan’s skill, since without the suppressed hurt and curiosity behind his hangdog face, his character would be a mere cipher.
