North Mountain: a two-spirited action hero is just what we need

REVIEW by Drew Rowsome

Perhaps North Mountain suffered from heightened expectations. Billed as a thriller with a central love story between two two-spirited intergenerational men. Executive produced by Thom Fitzgerald who created three films I deeply admire - The Hanging Garden, Beefcake and Cloudburst - and starring Justin Rain who made a big impression in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (I was unable to sit through the film but confess to lingering over the stills featuring Rain as much as over the photos and gifs of Taylor Lautner) and also appears in Fear the Walking Dead. 

Director Bretten Hannam is a two-spirited filmmaker who has considerable buzz, and the publicity department uses tantalizing buzzwords including

a cross between Brokeback Mountain and Rambo

As the film opens with gorgeously shot - courtesy of cinematographer Tarek Abouamin - vistas of snow covered wilderness, it seems the stars have aligned. The camera settles on the corpse of a deer and Rice enters to pay homage to its passed spirit. Then he discovers a man, Glen Gould, who has also been shot. And then the first of North Mountain's curious motivational actions takes place. The man wakens, they fight, Rice knocks him out and then takes him to the isolated cottage where Rice lives with his grandmother. In order to heal him.

He discovers the man has a briefcase full of cash which, far from being a maguffin, kicks the plot into action. Unfortunately the plot then lurches into weirdness. There are subtle clues that Rice's character Wolf may be a gay man, and we later learn that Gould's Crane had a scandalous friendship with Wolf's father. But when Wolf first entwines his fingers around Crane's hand only to be rebuffed, it comes out of nowhere. As does an aborted sex scene that arises out of a fist fight between the men.

The sex scene may be chaste in its duration, but the violence throughout North Mountain is graphic. Wolf has no problem killing the men who come to pursue them. But as we never know why he is so motivated or who the men are, and the two deaths that do resonate are glossed over, the tension goes a little slack. The fire is spectacular and the deaths are gruesome and realistic, but when the plot switches into action mode, the pacing doesn't. The synthy-tense score bubbles up for the first time but then fades away, I chalk it up to a metaphor of the pitiless silence of the Canadian wilderness as a metaphor for the gulf between the men and the inhumanity of the others. I should have been too absorbed to drift into such contemplation.

Rain is a miracle in close-up and when shirtless. He has an uncanny ability to register intense emotions with the tiniest of facial expressions, to let the audience see into his soul through his eyes. That is an innate leading man trait, and if only we were clued into what those emotions are or why they surface, it would be a starmaking performance. Rain has it in him to be a great two-spirited action hero and I hope he gets the opportunity: he carries North Mountain on that possibility.

North Mountain was filmed in 2015 and was at the Inside Out Festival in 2016 but is only now getting a commercial release. There is a wonderful film buried in North Mountain and maybe it just needed more time or, more likely, money. There are continuity problems -visually involving snow or wounds, textually involving motivation - which wouldn't be noticed if the pace weren't so deliberate and the cutaways so obvious. It seems churlish to not rave about a film that attempts something so necessary, that attempts to fill a void in both the action and romance genres. If I had stumbled on North Mountain, and felt smug about discovering its subtexts, it would have been even more fascinating. 

When, towards the end, one of the villains begins to taunt Wolf by calling him "savage" and speculating disparagingly on the sexual activity between Wolf and Crane, North Mountain achieves its aim. Regardless of how muddled the plotting has been, how inexplicable the characters' choices have been, the desire for revenge, for justice, takes over. The slow burn pays off just enough to earn a cheer and a certain amount of satisfaction.