Review: The Climb (Sundance 2020)

PLOT: Two lifelong best friends (Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin) find themselves unable to end their toxic friendship, despite causing each other virtually nothing but pain.

REVIEW: THE CLIMB is a feature-length extension of a short film that played some years back at Sundance. A hilarious exploration of a toxic friendship and the fallout it causes to those around it, it’s easy to see why this passion project of writers-directors-stars Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin was picked up by Sony Classics for a theatrical run this spring. It’s a crowd-pleasing, dark, but ultimately hilarious look at the friendships that, for better or worse, define us. Just as we don’t get to pick our families, a lot of the time we seemingly don’t get to pick our friends either and the film explores how this can be both a blessing and a curse.

It has a killer opening, with the two pals, who share the actors' first names, biking up a hill in the French countryside. The more level-headed of the two, Kyle, is there to marry his French girlfriend (Judith Godreche), but the more reckless Michael has a confession – he’s sleeping with his pal’s fiancée and, well, loves her too. Flash forward a few years and their mutual lover, who ultimately became Michael’s wife, is now dead, leaving her husband an alcoholic shell of his former self. While rightfully cut out of his ex-best friend’s life, Kyle’s parents (Talia Balsam and George Wendt) can’t help but try to reunite them with the ulterior motive being that they hope lightning strikes twice and Michael ruins another one of Kyle’s relationships, with him now engaged to the headstrong Marissa (the great Gayle Rankin of “Glow”).

While this may sound like a lot of plot, it’s only the jumping-off point for what turns out to be an edgy but very humane comedy, with Michael constantly wreaking havoc on Kyle’s life, even if his intentions, while skewed, are kinda noble (if hugely misguided). The two have the kind of chemistry that can’t be faked so it’s no surprise to learn the two are lifelong best friends in real life, with their on-screen shorthand making them two of the most realistic big screen pals of all time.

Unfolding very much like a sixties/seventies French farce (complete with many nods to French cinema both onscreen on in the soundtrack and chapter breaks), this could have probably been turned into a slapstick vehicle, but the two keep it real and gritty. Both are charismatic, grounded performers that should wind up in high demand off of this (Marvin is a dead-ringer for a young John C. Reilly). All of the roles here are fleshed out, especially Gayle Rankin’s, with her the kind of character that would have been portrayed as shrewish in the mainstream Hollywood version, but here is proven to be far more complicated and worthy of our sympathy. You’ll even find yourself rooting for her most of the time as she seems to have far more on the ball than these likable clowns, and in an inspired twist, the movie acknowledges that our friendships are, in many ways, just as important to us as our romances. Losing either can be devastating, and the movie never asks you to root against our toxic pair repairing a relationship that any good shrink might tell them should stay broken.

Truly, THE CLIMB is an early highlight from this year’s Sundance Film Festival and one that’s worth tracking down once it opens (note – the film is getting a live-streamed premiere in Landmark theatres on January 26th live from Sundance). It’s an inspired buddy comedy, in some ways the more realistic, indie flavored version of I LOVE YOU MAN. It’s bound to go down as a classic bromance and it’s not to be missed.