The Eight Mountains (2022, Felix van Groeningen & Charlotte Vandermeersch) (Patreon)

51/100

Hammers home its central dichotomy with the same diligence that Pietro the peripatetic city boy and Bruno the immovable country boy exhibit while rebuilding a collapsed house. By god, we are not gonna somehow fail to register these lifelong friends' oppositional needs and (literal) worldviews, even if that means trotting out a helpful titular metaphor—complete with pencil sketch!—that casts one of them as a ring of eight smaller peaks surrounding the other's towering pinnacle. "It's a strange tree," Bruno tells Pietro at one point. "Very strong wherever they sprout, but vulnerable when moved"...and I guess we should be grateful that he doesn't add "Kind of like me, if you think about it, and you definitely should." Somehow, this schematic codependent bond gets dragged out to an enervating 2½ hours, even as more compelling elements get too little attention; maybe the novel digs deeper into Pietro's feelings about his best pal not merely living up to his father's expectations, to a degree that proved impossible for Pietro himself, but eventually more or less replacing him as a surrogate son. Heady stuff, potentially, but the movie's much more interested in making Bruno a doomed personification of the gorgeous Alpine landscape. To be fair, reading Cognetti's descriptions of his setting couldn't possibly have the impact that actually seeing them does, so I'd feel silly arguing, as I so often do w/r/t literary adaptations, that this story clearly belongs on the page. Despite nuanced performances from Luca Marinelli (much more relaxed here than he was as Martin Eden) and Alessandro Borghi (previously unknown to me), however, The Eight Mountains feels largely inert in every way but the superficially pictorial. Both characters are held hostage by the concept, and the rhythm becomes plodding. Also not a big fan of composer Daniel Norgren, whose songs make it seem as if he really wishes that his surname were Johnston, and whose score constantly suggests imminent danger that never arrives. Memo to Bruno: It's actually quite useful to have a single word that encompasses trees and rocks and meadows and mountains; sneering that only city folk say "nature" is like complaining about urbanites referring to "food."