The broken brilliance of being young

It’s entirely possible that the world’s most brilliant mind is in the body of a child. And also imprisoned behind a veil of paralyzing awkwardness. 

In A Brilliant Young Mind we’re introduced to a number of worthy candidates, all of whom are trying to out-awkward each other with cold facts, debilitating shyness and enough social tics they could be charted into “trigonometric identities,” or whatever that is. 

Nathan (Asa Butterfield) is one of these young people. The British lad sees the world in geometry, algebra and calculus. He’s by all estimates a genius, yet he can barely function in the real world. When his mother orders take-out if the fish sticks and chips aren’t positioned symmetrically and in prime numbers then he flips out.

He’s guided by teacher Martin Humphreys (Rafe Spall, son of Timothy), who suggests he participate in a mathematics olympiad for the most brilliant young pupils. Nathan takes the test, passes and soon finds himself in Taiwan studying with other mathletes his age. He gets a crude wake-up when his fried prawns are delivered in an eight-count container … so close to a prime number, but yet not.

The film dips into darker territory as the characters open up and reveal their even more fragile cores. One boy, Luke, is likely autistic, which leads to bullying even in these nerdy circles. A Chinese student that Nathan is paired with is harassed because her uncle is the director of the team. Nathan’s issue is just communicating on a basic level. He mumbles, recoils at the lightest touch and his eyes reveal sparkles of brilliant pain. This wounded kid is thrown into a new culture and he remarkably thrives, which breaks the heart of his mother (Sally Hawkins), who can’t seem to understand why he’ll open up to everyone but her. 

Of course, the film all boils down to the math olympiad, but then it’s not that simple. It’s written with care and truth, and no “big game” sports climax will ever solve all the issues swirling around in this layered and pristinely textured script by James Graham. There is some stale cliche, including a “surprise car crash” still in the clamshell packaging and a race to the train station to get the girl, but even those conventions are given new spins, fresh perspectives.

The math is dense and confusing, and is barely explained outside of one sequence in which Nathan turns a card trick into a binary matrix. In other scenes the equations are just glossed over in broad strokes. I knew it was complex stuff, though, because the math problems had more letters than numbers, and brackets within brackets within brackets. “If truth is beauty and beauty is truth, then surely mathematics is the most beautiful thing in the world,” says an olympiad leader played by the great Eddie Marsan. I’ll take your word for it. 

Although the surface of this coming-of-age story is rather blandly paced and acted, there are deeper currents of emotional agony that are running through this film. Scratch but a tiny bit down and it opens some terrifying places related to love, family, success and acceptance. But in the end, like math, it has an inherent beauty to all of it.

Stunning climbing movie opens 1996 wounds

Nothing in the world feels as helpless as watching people suffer within an arm’s reach of safety. You can see them, you can hear them, you can almost reach out and touch them, but they might as well be on the moon. Help will not come. Only death.

Everest does not sugar-coat this cold — bone-rattlingly cold — reality, but it does dress it up a bit with adrenaline-fueled adventure that comes with climbing to the highest point in the world. Mount Everest, at 29,029 feet high, is the gold standard for pushing the human body to its most extreme potential. The summit is so high it shares an altitude with a cruising 747 jet. The air is so thin that the human body slowly fails as it gasps for oxygen. The edges are steep enough that one false step and a climber will never be seen again, their bodies are consumed by the mountain and its icy pores.

Why go then? That’s what reporter and author Jon Krakauer asks a group of climbers who’ve paid five figures to joust with nature on Everest’s slopes. “Because it’s there,” they all laugh, stealing George Mallory’s famous line about the deadly peak, a peak that killed many climbers, including George Mallory. Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest features Krakauer, author of the book Into Thin Air, but largely focuses on Rob Hall, a dedicated and skilled climber who guides “climbing tourists” up Everest during the month or so of good weather that creates a window of opportunity through a collapsing glacier field, over a rocky plain, across a knife’s edge, up a vertical step of rock and onto the summit of the world’s highest mountain.

It’s no easy feat. The cold is relentless, the air is dangerously thin, the physical stamina required is second to none, and the weather is violent and unpredictable. All totaled up, everything is deadly, but nothing more than a climber’s own body, which slowly betrays its own muscles and nerves with every failed, agonizing breath. Humans weren’t made for these conditions, so it’s Rob Hall’s job to guide everyone up and down the mountain before their bodies collapse. And they pay him $65,000 for the privilege. 

Hall, here played with a gentle warmth and crucial demeanor by Jason Clarke, is the star of this ensemble mountaineering adventure and he’s joined by his clients Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin) and Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), his base camp leader Helen Wilton (Emily Watson), Krakauer (Michael Kelly) and a colleague with another company, Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), as well as many other characters all portraying actual climbers and sherpas.

The film does not skimp on details, and routinely shows climbing in an authentic light, from the slow acclimatization process that is required for climbers to maximize the thin air on Everest, to the tediously slow pace the climbers take as they lumber up the mountain. This is not Cliffhanger, or even that mixed cheese plate Vertical Limit. Everest, using much of Krakauer’s fact-checked text, and his personal observations, treats the events of the 1996 climbing season with delicate reverence. 

As Hall and his company, Adventure Consultants, creep up the mountain, everything seems to be going well. The Everest newbies are struggling, but not dangerously so. As they prepare for a big ascent day, the day is almost perfect until a rapidly moving storm sweeps up and over the mountain essentially stopping the expedition in its tracks after a successful summit attempt. The serenity of the snow and the mountains is suddenly gone, and the climbers are left stranded in deadly conditions. Hall and Hansen are highest up, and have a long way down with little oxygen left. Below them Fischer, Weathers and others claw through the white-out conditions.

If you’re like me you’ll start getting very anxious in your seat during the second half of this film. These men are in mortal danger, and yet they shamble along with their coats open, their hands ungloved and their feet stumbling over rocks and patches of ice. Some men can’t even stand, and they slump down in their tracks to fall into a numbing sleep. You want to scream at them, “Hurry! Your life depends on it.” The thin air plays tricks on their bodies. Their muscles can only move so fast, and their brains flicker on and off from a severe lack of oxygen. Everest is killing them slowly, and there is nothing they can do except descend, if only they could stand and walk. Some men fall off the mountain, which a non-climber can understand and fear, but this slow death is worse — sinister and cruel.

What’s even worse is the small army of rested climbers who are held at bay by the storm, unable to ascend further than they already have because they lack oxygen, strength or the willpower to sacrifice themselves. In some cases, climbers are left on the mountain to die because they can easily slow down healthy climbers or pull them off the edge. And even when climbers do die, their bodies are left right on the trails, because hauling them down is a risk all by itself. At one point, no one can get to two climbers, and all the base camp can do is put one climber’s wife on the radio to say goodbye as he drifts into eternity. 

The facts of the 1996 climbing disaster on Everest are widely known, and have been documented in a number of ways, including the IMAX movie led by David Breshears, who returns as consultant, second unit director and Everest cinematographer for this film. This is an old story, but it’s given a fresh new examination here with Kormákur’s brilliant filmed movie. It’s well acted, marvelously paced, as accurate as any historical movie can hope to be, and the cinematography is simply gorgeous. Some of the shots look like IMAX stills, with sherpas hauling goods over tiny bridges stretched across valleys, oxen cresting ridges against the backdrop of the Himalayas, and of Everest reaching into the starry heavens.

This is an incredible movie, one about heroism and its devastating limits in a place like Everest. The rules on that rock are absolutely absurd. And failure to comply to them usually results in fatalities. Yet every year people line up to risk everything and make the trek upward. Everest makes the joke that they do it “because it’s there,” but the film also makes a point to address another answer as to why people climb it — “because it’s magnificent.”

Sex comedy aims for zero laughs, hits bullseye

Sleeping With Other People is a soul-crushing void of raunch, flimsy paper-thin comedy and dialogue written by a sixth grader who likes to snicker at the entries for “penis” and “vagina” in Webster’s Dictionary. It’s about people who are having lots of sex, although I left wondering if anyone involved with the movie had actually participated in the act or if they had just learned of the practice from cheap porno and a dial-up connection.

I will gladly sit through edgy, or vulgar, or filth as long as there is something that anchors everything into place. This is just random word association with sex flashcards, and delivered with dialogue so mundane that two mechanics discussing radiator repair would be downright erotic in comparison. It’s the kind of movie where the two stars are introduced by her complimenting his porn, and him complimenting her panties. Classy. 

She is Lainey (Alison Brie) and he is Jake (Jason Sudeikis). They meet in college and lose their virginity to each other. Fast forward 12 years and they meet at a sex addiction support group, which is really where all the nymphomaniacs go to get ideas (Billy Eichner’s here doing a routine that would funny in any movie but this one). Lainey’s boyfriend has just broken up with her, and her side-guy, a dorky gynecologist, refuses to leave his wife. Jake drifts from one sexual encounter to another, a boat bobbing in the current. “Hey,” they figure, “let’s be benefit-free friends to keep each other company during our miserable descents into nowhere.” They even have a safe word, “mousetrap,” to signal when the sexual tension is overwhelming.

Yeesh, this movies just doesn’t stop blabbing. So much dialogue, it feels like it never stops. Not just dialogue either, but then narration, pop-up text messages, phone calls, all of it made up of grown adults internalizing their sexual failures until they eventually glitch out and have to reboot in safe mode. And all of it explicit in one way or another. At one point they talk about their favorite sex positions in front of a TV salesman, who smiles and nods like it’s the most normal thing in the universe. The film really lost me in an early scene, when Jake’s business partner turns to Lainey and asks, “Are you the one who made my friend a slut, or was it his father who molested him?” Yikes, it’s so bad it stings. 

The wheels really come off when Sudeikis, who’s unable to hide complete and utter embarrassment at this point, takes an empty tea jar, jams his fingers inside and instructs his female costar where all the landmarks are in her most intimate place. And the detail he goes into is enough to make Larry Flynt gag. Poor Brie, she’s watching this poor jar and wishing a truck would crash through the set and drag her off the studio lot. She was on Mad Men, damn it, and this is so far beneath her it’s subterranean. 

The logical path through the filth is telegraphed in the opening scenes: of course these two wayward souls must fall in love, “mousetrap” or not. Getting to that point is so agonizing that even people who fetishize agony are searching, clawing, scraping for their safewords.