The Mountain Between Us

Like most movie goers, I have a scale for what movies I will see when and where. At the very top of the scale are the very few movies that I insist on seeing in the theater on opening weekend. After that come the movies I want to see in the theater but as long as it’s within the first week or two, it’s fine. Then come what my wife and I call “screeners,” the ones we want to see but only when they come out on disc or streaming. Down at the very bottom of the scale are the movies that Netflix somehow automatically plays and the remote is too far away for me to bother turning it off. It’s a low bar.

Recently, I encountered one of our screeners, The Mountain Between Us starring Kate Winslet and Idris Elba. When it was released in theaters last Fall, it appeared to be a handsome, well-made film with talented performers, but it lacked the hook to actually drag me into the multiplex. Winslet and Elba are both consistently strong actors, but neither them nor the premise of the movie – two strangers stranded together in the mountains after a plane crash – were enough to get the film into the top tiers of my scale.

Now that it is out for home viewing, I gave it a try.

As I said, the premise is simple. Two strangers, a journalist and a surgeon, are both in a hurry to leave rural Idaho and get back to their lives on the east coast. So when their regular flight is cancelled because of an oncoming storm, they charter a small plane to get them to a connection in Denver. Right over a sprawling, remote mountain range, their pilot has a stroke and the plane crashes. The pilot dies, and they are left on their own to recover from their injuries and begin making hard decisions about whether to stay with the wreckage in hopes of being rescued or strike out on their own in an effort to save themselves by hiking to civilization.

A few things struck me about the production: first of all, it is, at its heart, a melodrama. On the surface, it’s obviously meant to be a survival thriller, but the film is actually much more concerned with the main characters’ romantic state rather than whether they have enough food or water. Normally, this would be off-putting, but that leads me to the second thing that I noticed about the film which is that talented people can elevate mediocre material.

Elba and Winslet are both remarkably talented performers who bring a groundedness and gravity to all their roles. Elba is inching closer and closer to being a household name, and he’s doing it one steely, well-crafted role at a time. Winslet, of course, has been creating distinct, daring characters for a couple of decades now, and has brought humanity, grit, and believability to even the silliest of scripts, like Titanic. The two of them give this rather soapy and unlikely story a dignified humanity. Their talent lifts the nominal material above what it would normally be.

The behind-the camera talent is also a cut above average. Director Hany Abu-Assad and cinematographer Mandy Walker shot the entire film on location in the Purcell Mountain range of Canada, and their commitment to real locations and no greenscreen pays off. Visually, the film is really impressive. It makes the most of being in the middle of nowhere and being able to see hundreds of miles in any direction without any sign of civilization.

The story of The Mountain Between Us is no masterwork of originality, and in less talented hands, it could have just as easily been a movie on the Lifetime network starring two actors you recognize from guest spots on Law and Order. But here it becomes a solidly good movie. Not great, not see-it-in-the-theater-the-night-it-opens good, but definitely an entertaining screener at home.