87 min | R | February 14, 2020 | Searchlight Pictures
A family at an Austrian ski resort scatters when an avalanche bears down on their lunch. The snow stops short and nobody is hurt, but Dad ran and left his wife and kids behind. The mountain misses. The marriage does not.
A family vacations at a luxury ski resort in the Austrian Alps. A controlled avalanche barrels toward the outdoor restaurant where they sit. Pete grabs his phone and runs. Billie shields the children. The snow stops short of the tables and everyone returns to lunch, but the marriage does not recover. Downhill takes that one instinctive act of cowardice and watches a couple try to talk their way around it. The film is about the gap between who you believe you are and what you do when the mountain comes down.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Billie as a woman who keeps reaching for normal and cannot find it. She replays the avalanche in her head and rebuilds it for dinner guests until the truth she names becomes unavoidable. Will Ferrell plays Pete in a deflated minor key, all hollow grins and deflection, a man who would rather concede anything than admit the one thing that matters. Their best scene puts them in a couples session with a resort employee as referee, and the silence between denials does the real work. Miranda Otto plays Charlotte, the resort’s relentlessly libidinous concierge, as comic relief that the film does not know how to use.
Nat Faxon and Jim Rash direct from a script they wrote with Jesse Armstrong, adapting Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure. They shoot the Alps in wide, sterile compositions that dwarf the family against engineered slopes and glass hotel corridors. The mountain looks beautiful and managed, which is the point, except the camera keeps cutting away from discomfort instead of holding on it. Ostlund lets scenes run until they curdle. Faxon and Rash trim them to a polite length and let the score smooth the edges. The cruelty that should fester gets resolved before it can sting.
Downhill identifies a sharp idea and refuses to press on it. The premise demands that the audience sit inside an unbearable marriage and the film keeps offering exits. Louis-Dreyfus and Ferrell commit fully to people who have run out of things to say to each other. The direction does not trust them to stay in the wound. What remains is a tasteful sketch of a savage movie that already exists somewhere colder.