The true story of a 12-year-old’s survival in a vast mountain wilderness for nine days in the 1930s.
The family adventure film “Lost on a Mountain in Maine” — based on the 1939 memoir of the same name by Donn Fendler with Joseph Egan — recounts the story of a 12-year-old boy alone in the wilderness of Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak.
An opening intertitle declares, if a tad defensively, “This Is a True Story.” Sure, the movie is inspired by actual events, but the truth the film yearns for is to be a story unencumbered by the insights or demands of our current moment. Even the film’s director, Andrew Bood Kightlinger, characterizes it lovingly as a “throwback.” (Sylvester Stallone is one of the producers.)
After angrily arguing with his father, Donn (Luke David Blumm) gets separated from his twin brother and their energetic hiking guide amid a slashing summer storm. The movie alternates between the headstrong protagonist’s battles with bugs, leeches, hunger and disorientation, and his parents’ fraught limbo of guilt, hope and despair. Interspersed throughout is documentary footage filmed decades later of friends, family and others who witnessed those nine days that captured much of the nation’s attention.
Caitlin FitzGerald portrays Donn’s steadfast mother, Ruth. Paul Sparks is the stern father whose brow is furrowed by muted but palpable economic woes. Before he took his boys on the hike, he’d been eyeing headlines and listening to radio reports of a slow, post-Depression recovery and of brewing international unrest.
Theirs may not be a wonderful life — and “Lost on a Mountain” never fully achieves its complicated halcyon aims — but an early scene of Ruth on the phone, rallying help in the search for Donn, is pure Mary Bailey.
Lost on a Mountain in Maine
Rated PG for thematic elements, peril, language and some injury images. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
