Mountain Rest

In Mountain Rest, Frankie and her teenage daughter Clara travel into the Blue Ridge Mountains to visit Frankie’s mother, Ethel, an aging actress whom Frankie hasn’t seen in sixteen years.

Based on this description, I rather expected this film to follow the well-worn path: Frankie reconciles with her mother and through this reconciliation heals her relationship with her own daughter, Clara. This is not what happens, and perhaps I should applaud this movie for breaking the mold - but Mountain Rest really has nothing to replace it with. The story feels shapeless and unsatisfying and except for Ethel, who comes across as a flaming narcissist, none of the characters feel particularly well-developed.

I thought the movie did a particularly poor job with Bascomb, Ethel’s much younger lover (it is implied) who (it is also implied) used to date Frankie, and might be Clara’s father, and also might be creeping on Clara? (This entire paragraph illustrates a problem endemic in the movie, which is that it is allergic to explaining things even when it would be both simple and natural to explain.)

Or, at any rate, there’s a scene when Clara runs into him in the hall after her shower (she’s wearing a towel) and he tells her that she looks just like her mother did at her age “or maybe cuter,” and later they have a fireside chat where the camera lingers in extreme close-up on Clara’s face and her big dark liquid eyes, and she lights a cigarette for herself and he plucks it from her mouth…

It’s all vaguely creepy (especially if he is Clara’s father), but then the whole plot thread just… evaporates. Why bring it up just to drop it? Was it not meant to feel that creepy?

I also suspect that the movie intended Ethel to come across as more likable than she does. But how can she? She seems determined to play Frankie and Clara off each other from the moment they arrive. “You’ll never understand Clara anymore than you ever understood me,” Ethel tells Frankie, as if it were Frankie’s job when she was a child to understand her mother rather than the other way around.

(This is not to say that Frankie is the world’s greatest mother herself. At one point, annoyed that Ethel’s campaign to win over Clara is working, she needles Clara about her unwillingness to sing in public. There’s no one to root for in this movie.)

The climax of the movie occurs when Ethel gives a rambling, cringe-worthy speech in which she acknowledges rumors that she killed her husband and insists that no, she didn’t, they were just sitting on the cliff one day and he told her that he was sick of hearing about Hollywood so much and she retaliated by rambling on and on about how wonderful life in Hollywood was and how many lovers she had and how dull and narrow and close-minded he is until he jumped off the cliff.

So her defense is “I didn’t kill him! I just drove him to suicide because I felt just as much contempt for him as I feel for the rest of you!” Then she cried for a week, and then she got over it, just the way that she got over her daughter leaving and never tried to contact her for all the sixteen years since she left.

Possibly we’re supposed to be on Ethel’s side with this speech because after all these people have been TALKING about her, and that’s so MEAN, but given that Ethel is such a mean person herself, eh. She’s one of those people who wants absolute liberty to run everyone else down while insisting that it’s cruel and unfair for anyone else to treat her that way. Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it, Ethel.