Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

It’s always fun for us Washingtonians when we get a local celebrity in a film actually set in our state. Tom Skerritt has done it more than once: in the 1992 movie Singles, he played the Mayor of Seattle—a guy who rejects one of the main characters’ plan for rapid rail transit because “people love their cars.” Shows what he knew!

I was just shocked to discover Skerritt is 88 years old. Even in the 1979 film Alien, he was 45. His earliest credit on IMDb.com is from when he was 29, in 1962. My point is, the man is old. Only recently has he begun to play parts about being old, though. We don’t ever learn exactly how old his character in East of the Mountains is, but it’s clear that terminally ill Ben Givens has lived a long life. He is preoccupied by memories of his early days with the wife who just died a year ago, in the Eastern Washington town where they met. Again, the movie never explicitly states what the town is that he returns to, but given the number of Mexican American characters and the apple orchards, presumably it’s around Yakima or Wenatchee.

As opposed to Mayor Weber, Ben is far past loving his car. He takes his dog on a road trip from his Seattle home to the other side of the mountains, and when it breaks down on the side of the highway, he just abandons it. He takes his family heirloom rifle, the dog in tow, and walks out into the Eastern Washington desert to do some bird hunting. And, to fulfill his plan to end his life.

Director S.J. Chiro waits quite some time into this story before telling us exactly why Ben has made this decision. Eventually, while Ben is talking to the local veterinarian he meets after his dog is attacked in the desert by a coyote hunting dog, he gets surprisingly explicit. Ben spent fifty years as a surgeon, so he knows what horrors to expect at the end of his life in his condition. I still thought about that after the film’s deceptively pleasant ending.

That said, I also wondered why Ben doesn’t consider assisted suicide. He’s a smart man; surely he knows Washington is relatively well known as a state with a Death with Dignity law, enacted in 2009. That no one in the movie even mentions it feels a little bit like a plot hole. Presumably it can be done a lot more pleasantly than pointing a rifle under your chin, something we see Ben do several times during the course of the film.

But, I guess, in that case we wouldn’t get to witness his comfortably melancholy hero’s journey. After he leaves his concerned daughter behind (Mira Sorvino, the only notable character not played by a local actor), we spend a lot of time alone with Ben, and Skerritt carries these scenes very well on his own. But, we also see him cross paths with a string of other characters along the way. Among these characters, there is a casual diversity I quite liked: a young interracial couple who picks up Ben along the highway; a Spanish-speaking man who helps him with his dog and ultimately brings him to the aforementioned veterinarian, Anita (Annie Gonzalez). Anita invites him for dinner while the dog has to stay two nights at the vet hospital, and she casually mentions how many more brown people there must be in the area than when Ben was young. It’s a passing moment, and they bond over something that has nothing to do with it: their respective histories as military vets.

I was a bit struck by how flatteringly Eastern Washington is depicted in East of the Mountains. Western Washingtonians have a tendency to be dismissive or contemptuous of the far more conservative Eastern Washington, but this movie has nothing but love for it. Even as someone who fled Eastern Washington the moment I could, I found this refreshing. Cinematographer Sebastien Scandiuzzi finds the beauty in all of the landscapes, creating indelible images of such beauty they arguably make the movie worth seeing on their own. Many movies are made in which their setting is described as “a character” in the film, but never have I seen that specifically with Central Washington. Some of the shots, of apple orchards or of low clouds passing over Evergreens of the Cascade Mountains, could be used in tourism commercials.

The entire cast is quite lovely, but Tom Skerritt makes the movie, combined with its beautiful imagery. Plenty of films have been made about people getting old and facing existential considerations, but context is key, and East of the Mountains has a unique context. This is a leisurely paced, meditative examination of how an elderly, terminal person might end their life on their own terms. It’s not nearly as sad as it sounds; in fact it’s a fairly pleasant ride. Strangely, it reminds us of how little more time we’ll get Skerritt onscreen and how much he will be missed when he’s gone.

*A brief Odyssey for Pacific Northwesterners.*

B+