- Title: Jeff Goldblum wants to pick your brains in lobotomy movie "The Mountain"
- Date: 3rd September 2018
- Summary: VENICE, ITALY (AUGUST 31, 2018) (REUTERS) ****WARNING: CONTAINS FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY*** (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTOR, JEFF GOLDBLUM, SAYING: "Yes, I'm drunken and picking up women for distraction, not necessarily for their wholesome benefit, that's correct, and it's not so nice and there are other issues in the movie that overlap that, yes. It's like lobotomy itself - oftentimes on women who during the 50s were thought to be needed to be mollified for one kind of thing or another and it's a mistaken and primitive way that hopefully we are correcting but as we know it still needs correction." VENICE, ITALY (AUGUST 30, 2018) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF GOLDBLUM AND WIFE EMILIE LIVINGSTON POSING FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS ON RED CARPET VENICE, ITALY (AUGUST 31, 2018) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTOR, JEFF GOLDBLUM, SAYING: "It's really nice and special being here with my wife too, it's kind of like a honeymoon-ish kind of experience and then to be with a movie that I'm very proud of is special, doesn't happen every year." VENICE, ITALY (AUGUST 30, 2018) (REUTERS) GOLDBLUM AND WIFE EMILIE LIVINGSTON POSING FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS ON RED CARPET BACK OF GOLDBLUM AND WIFE EMBRACING VARIOUS OF GOLDBLUM AND WIFE POSING FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS ON RED CARPET GOLDBLUM POSING FOR PHOTOS VENICE, ITALY (AUGUST 31, 2018) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTOR, JEFF GOLDBLUM, SAYING: "She goosed me (grabbed my buttock)? Well, err, maybe she did, she's always up to some mischief, and something delightful and surprising and I like it." DIRECTOR RICK ALVERSON SPEAKING WITH GOLDBLUM AND ARRIVING FOR INTERVIEW (SOUNDBITE) (English) DIRECTOR, RICK ALVERSON, SAYING: "Well, I mean, you know the film is set in 1954 and you know, there's, not just in cinema but in culture, in Western culture a romanticising of the era of the 50s, you know those history books were written by white males and that period of time, you know the slogans of the ruling party in the States - the 'Make America Great Again' slogan particularly - that America that they are trying to make great again was only great for a very small demographic, a segment of the population, white males. So I think that the film makes an effort to, you know, analyse the impact of that because those ramifications of maleness, I think they were by-products of it and those by-products were suppression of those freedoms for much of the rest of the population." ACTOR TYE SHERIDAN ARRIVING FOR INTERVIEW (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTOR, TYE SHERIDAN, SAYING: "I think the movie intentionally is countered against the typical experience that we have in 2018 watching those films and consuming media. I think that there's a lot to do with how passive you take in a narrative now and how it doesn't ask anything out of you, you know, and some things are so accessible and easy to kind of grasp so you end up just kind of losing this element of critical thinking. And I think this movie really, it does challenge the viewer, I think, ways that cinema should and that's why I think this film is really important."
- Embargoed: 17th September 2018 17:15
- Keywords: The Mountain Rick Alverson film actor Jeff Goldblum Venice Film Festival Goldblum goosed by wife on red carpet actor Tye Sheridan lobotomy movie
- Location: VENICE, ITALY AND VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
- City: VENICE, ITALY AND VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
- Country: Italy
- Topics: Art,Arts / Culture / Entertainment
- Reuters ID: LVA0038W2PIKT
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Jeff Goldblum is charismatic as ever in "The Mountain", where he plays a smooth-talking doctor with an effective way of rendering people with psychiatric problems "innocuous" - a term he uses as a euphemism for his devastating medical procedure.
Set in the 1950s, Goldblum's Wallace Fiennes is based on real-life lobotomist Walter Freemanan, an evangelist of the operation that consisted of hammering spikes into patients' brains through their eye sockets to sever their prefrontal cortex.
Fiennes befriends Andy, a troubled young man played by "Ready Player One" star Tye Sheridan, who becomes his assistant and photographer as he travels from hospital to hospital. The doctor spends his free time drinking and womanising.
"I'm drunken and picking up women for distraction - not necessarily for their wholesome benefit... and it's not so nice," Goldblum told Reuters in an interview on Friday (August 31) at the Venice Film Festival where the movie is in competition for the Golden Lion.
A far cry from the blockbuster "Jurassic Park" franchise, "The Mountain" is a slow-paced film that writer-director Rick Alverson made deliberately obtuse to force viewers to "wrestle" with to find its true meaning.
"It's an anti-utopian film. It's a consideration of the Western, and in this case particularly American, impulse to lunge unbridled into a future without consideration of the ramifications," Alverson said.
Set in 1954, the movie is a meditation of the end of the all-powerful white male in America with relevance for the Trump era, he told Reuters.
"There's a romanticising the era of the 50s," Alverson said. "The slogans of the ruling party in the States - the 'Make America Great Again' slogan - that America that they are trying to make great again was only great for a small ... segment of the population - white males ... (with) suppression of freedoms for much of the rest of the population."
Goldblum, who called the film an "epic poem" and an x-ray into the American psyche, said the lobotomy procedure - which was eventually discredited - was a metaphor for toxic masculinity, as it was often used "on women who, during the 50s, were thought to be needed to be mollified".
"It's a mistaken and primitive way that hopefully we are correcting but, as we know, it still needs correction." - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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