Rick-34

Good movie, but I can see why people have issues with it.

This is not a Hollywood comedy. It's not what audiences are going to expect when they see a movie stars Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. It's not a laugh-a-minute movie.

This movie is about a couple in crisis, a crisis that starts when the Ferrell character acts like a coward when the ski resort the family is staying at is threatened by an avalanche. His character flees his family and runs for safety.

The main part of the movie deals with the afterath. It's not a funny premise.

About 15 years ago, Ricky Gervais started doing a show called "The Office". Gervais found humor by exploring painful and embarrassing humor. It's not easy humor to grasp: it's not escapist humor, it's the kind of humor found by laughing at the human condition. It's not what Americans expect, esp. in a Will Ferrell movie.

"Downhill" is an exercise in cringe humor. A view who goes in expecting that can appreciate the movie for what it's doing. And points need to go to Ferrell for playing such an awful, confused man. And Julia Louis-Dreyfus is terrific in the lead role.

Having seen this movie, I now want to see Force Majeure, the Swedish movie it was based on. I would not be surprised to discover it's a much stronger movie. It is difficult to translate European comedies to Hollywood: Americans demand our comedies by light and fluffy. Feels like "Downhill" was a compromise, much as "Cousins" was a watered down version of "Cousin, Cousine", and "The Bird Cage" was a watered down version of "La Cage aux Folles".

What really irritates me here is that, once again, the studio marketers badly misrepresented the nature of a movie just to sell tickets. Had the studio been honest about what the movie was trying to do, we would not be seeing so many 1-star reviews from people who had the wrong expectations about what this movie was.

A good movie for much of the way, worth watching largely for the interplay between the three leads. Harrelson, Banderas, and Davidovich have great banter during the road trip to Vegas from LA. The fight itself is enjoyable as boxing matches go, but the movie put itself in a bind in how it framed the two fighters, and the conclusion is a bit predictable. The ending of the movie is a bit anti-climactic. A good movie to watch as a TV movie when you have some time to kill. You get to see which actors were on the rise at the time and who the producers thought would be big celebrities. For example, getting Kevin Costner was a big deal in the '90s, though by 1999 his star was beginning to fade. On the whole, a middling movie.

I swear, 90% of the people writing negative reviews seem to have made no effort to understand that the entire film is metaphorical. Also, as metaphors work, a film like this isn't designed to have simple explanations.

The movie is about humanity's abuse of Mother Earth. But it also works at the level presented, where it's about a wife who suffers emotional cruelty at the hands of her emotionally unengaged husband. To a great extent the film is a commentary on the emotional abuse of women. And yes, it goes straight into fantasy from the start.

Viewers who only like realistic films should not see Mother! They will hate it. Having said that, Mother! is not like Rosemary's Baby. That comparison misses the point completely.

Also, Rex Reed is a doofus.