The Climb

“How many times must we watch and forgive assholes who are ‘at their core, good guys’?”

Title: The Climb (2019)
Director: Michael Angelo Covino 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Michael Angelo Covino 👨🏼🇺🇸 and Kyle Marvin 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

—MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 3.25/5

Michael Angelo Covino’s The Climb began life as an 8-minute short, first seen at Sundance Film Festival in 2018 before getting picked up by Sony Pictures Classics to receive the feature-length treatment. Fast-forward to today, where The Climb’s current protraction strings together 7 titled chapters into a competent whole, displaying creativity through highly choreographed cuts and a playful narrative structure.

Covino’s long-form version starts off strong, as bracing humor stirs up belly laughs from watching one best friend treat the other bro like trash. But the rinse-and-repeat betrayals don’t sit well across a 98-minute runtime. It’s one thing to sleep with your best friend’s fiancée—it’s another to do equally awful things time and time again, in one form or another. At some point, the schtick simply stops being interesting.

Moreover, with the film based loosely on the real-life relationship between director Covino (who plays himself as Mike, the toxic friend) and co-writer Kyle Marvin (playing himself as the quick-to-forgive friend), this overlay of film and reality forms an uneasy effect. When the filmmaker is also the villain, are we allowed to loathe him?

Although their characters are clearly exaggerated, the question hung over my head as I watched Mike do “reprehensible things,” as Covino himself calls it in press materials. Yet he appears to want the audience’s sympathies, adding:

“At his core, [Mike] is a good guy, but he’s selfish and self-involved. He’s aware of this, and he tends to beat himself up over it. [...] hopefully there’s an endearing quality about him. He’s always trying to do the right thing.”

And therein lies the rub. How many times must we watch and forgive assholes who are, “at their core, good guys”? I’m all for complex, even redeemable villains. And I’m all for the humanization of flawed people who fuck up sometimes. But the expectation that viewers should find repeated emotional abuse somehow endearing just felt like more than I could give.

Gender: 3.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

While the complicated relationship between Mike and Kyle anchors The Climb, supporting characters like Kyle’s girlfriend Marissa (Gayle Rankin) or his mother Suzi (Talia Balsam) feature prominently. In addition, Kyle’s ex-fiancée Ava (Judith Godrèche) plays a pivotal if fleeting role. Unfortunately, all women fall pretty hard into tropeish roles as either controlling, unfaithful, dead, or some permutation of the above.

The film’s most important female character, edgy New Yorker Marissa, stands as the wedge between Kyle and his loving (if slightly goofy) suburban family. She also stands between Kyle and Mike, the latter of whom jealously guards his time with his old—and eventually, only—friend. Worse yet, she comes off as antagonizing and unlikable, rendered through appalling behavior like smoking inside the house of Kyle’s parents or loudly fucking Kyle in the basement while Thanksgiving dinner prep takes place upstairs.

I’m not entirely sure why Covino chose to depict Marissa as such a drag. The Climb could easily have validated her frustrations with Kyle without losing any of its farcical humor. But instead, she gets reduced to a mix of the nagging girlfriend or controlling wife stereotypes we’ve seen time and time again. In fact, she only feels humanized in the film’s last two chapters, when audiences finally glimpse her treating Kyle with genuine affection. But with only a half hour left in the game or so, it feels like too little, too late.

Race: 1.5/5

The Climb devotes its time to two white leads. In supporting roles, Kyle’s family and love interests, Marissa and Ava, are also white. Black characters show up briefly across the film. During the second vignette, “Let Go”, a Black priest presides over a funeral. At the end of the scene, the narrative impishly twists into a musical format, as a group of Black working men burst into song while the camera pans across the gravedigger machine they’re situated around. The inclusion of Black workers should be welcome, but the odd tonal shift feels artificial and treats the men as props, rather than characters.

The only Black character with recurring scenes is George (Eric Pumphrey), the romantic partner of one of Kyle’s sisters. George always appears out of place, either smoking alone outside during Christmas (until Marissa slouches over to join him), or walking over to Mike after he disrupts Kyle’s wedding to say appreciatively, in his only line across the entire film, “That was awesome.”

None of the above depictions feel offensive, and neither is The Climb’s cast especially huge, with 33 actors listed on IMDB. But there’s no denying the white-centricity of this film, where token Black men eke out a micro-existence and women of color and other ethnicities are nonexistent.

Deduction for Body Diversity: -0.25

Weight gain gets directly tied to depression in The Climb. When Kyle is chubbier, it’s shorthand for him having a sad life. Once he appears more fit, it’s because he’s in a good place, emotionally—having found a new girlfriend and surrounded by family.

The same body-shaming goes for Mike: When he gets a beer belly, it’s associated with a slovenly look, lack of hygiene, borderline alcoholism, and overall sad-sack state. And just in case viewers didn’t get the drift, fat jokes abound in the Christmas chapter, as Kyle’s family repeatedly and individually come to the same conclusion, delivered as punchlines: “Mike got fat.”

Mediaversity Grade: C- 2.67/5

When IndieWire’s Eric Kohn pens an effusive review that still calls The Climb another “testosterone-fueled dude movie”, it doesn’t take a genius to see why Covino’s film might score poorly on metrics of inclusion.

If off-beat tragicomedy is your thing, The Climb might still work for you. But thanks to a dismal hour and a half of watching an adult manbaby repeatedly fuck over his really nice best friend—and grimacing as women stumble on land mine after land mine of tired tropes—there aren’t a whole lot of reasons to tackle The Climb.

Like The Climb? Try these other buddy comedies.

Grade: CLiJanuary 24, 2020