Lost on a Mountain in Maine (dir. Andrew Boodhoo Kightlinger, 2024)

Since I moved to Maine this fall, I was excited to review a new movie that’s set in Maine for my brand-new, Maine-centric blog. Lost on a Mountain in Maine is based on the classic Maine children’s book of the same title by the late Donn Fendler, who died in 2016 at the age of 90. As a boy at age 12 in July of 1939, Fendler was hiking with his father, his twin brother, and their guide on Mount Katahdin in Maine when Donn was separated from his family during a storm on the mountaintop, fell down an embankment, and then was lost for nine days in the dense wilderness of the mountainside. He walked over 80 miles to his rescue, a grueling journey for a 12-year-old boy, and one which he almost did not survive. His endurance and survival have made his tale a highly memorable one for many generations of Mainers ever since that time. For his bravery as a boy, he received the Army and Navy Legion of Valor’s annual medal for outstanding youth hero from President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 as well.

Andrew Boodhoo Kightlinger’s smartly conceived and finely paced film adaptation, which stars the remarkable Luke David Blumm in a very demanding role as the young Donn Fendler, accomplishes many difficult feats with a story that’s incredibly challenging to formulate in a visual medium, not only due to the wilderness setting, but also because of the physical and emotional demands the tale and its telling require of the actors. Thematically, the movie is concerned with the liminal zone between boyhood and manhood, and all that such rich territory implies for those who are courageous enough to explore it in this day and age. At what point exactly do boys become men? And what exactly makes them men? How and by whom does manhood get defined? The film examines those questions mainly via the lens of the bonds and strengths and challenges of family, both through fictional narrative re-enactments and vintage documentary interview clips with the Fendler family members, as well as with those who were close to the event of Donn's getting lost and then recovered, including some of the men who participated in the manhunt to find and rescue Donn Fendler.

The movie that I was most reminded of by this film was Danny Boyle’s amazing 127 Hours, starring James Franco in one of the most soulful performances in cinematic history. While Lost on a Mountain in Maine never quite approaches that level of exhilaration or technical innovation, it does pack in plenty of potency and many standalone moments of beauty and awe. A mystical encounter with Pamola, for instance, the hybrid moose/man/eagle spirit that the Penobscot Indians believed to be the god who inhabited the peak of Mount Katahdin, proves to be a powerful and unforgettable one, imagistically and otherwise. The scene borders on the spiritual without ever arriving there, landing firmly in the realm of the human instead. And Paul Sparks, who portrays Donn Fendler’s father, conveys the near-impossible during a deeply moving scene when young Donn, at his lowest physical point in his journey through the wilds of the mountainside, envisions his father speaking to him for inspiration towards the final push to keep himself alive. I can’t imagine anyone not being moved by this particular perfect moment in the film.

The effect that our fathers have on us as boys is another primary current in the movie’s under-structure: why we are propelled by them to learn how to fight, for example, and how that can have long-ranging outcomes, both positive and negative. In this case, his father’s insistence that his sons learn how to struggle and persevere is one of the lessons that perhaps saved Donn Fendler, alongside some basic Boy Scout tips like learning how to follow a river downhill. By his teenage years, Fendler would have mastered more skills like fishing and foraging, or how to start a fire from scratch, things that would have come in handy and then become quite valuable when he most needed them while stranded on the mountainside. But his not knowing those kinds of survival skills at such a tender age is what endows the movie with suspense and thereby gives its audience an attentive depth of interest. We all sit there communally together in the theater and want that boy to live. And live he does.