***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Nicholas Aaron, Richard Hawking, and Ollie Ryall, featuring interviews with Joe Simpson, Simon Yates, and Richard Hawking
Directed by Kevin Macdonald, from the book by Joe Simpson
2004
106 min R
Mountain climbers are insane. I don’t know if I needed a movie to remind me of that, but there you go. “Touching the Void” pretty much gets an automatic recommendation right away because, on the sofa next to me, my wife was freaking out and shaking and trying not to look during several parts. I can’t say I blame her, the movie is just that effective. Long drops onto jagged, snow-covered rocks are scary. We weren’t even watching the movie in a theater, but on a friend’s monster high-definition TV. The mountain is huge and terrifying, it is the movie’s star, and its performance—made without digital trickery—is brilliant.
What “Touching the Void” is not is a bunch of tanned-toned-muscleheads with Southern California accents ranting over endless guitar solos and frantically edited scenes of dudes showing-off with mountain climbing, skateboarding, hang gliding, or whatever else prompts otherwise healthy individuals to adopt the spelling “Xtreme.” “Touching the Void” is more precise and deliberately paced than that—not as precise as, say, De Palma or the Coen Bros. It plays like a real movie, not a “Sports Illustrated” promo.
In the mid-1980s, two mountain climbers named from the UK named Joe Simpson and Simon Yates found themselves a mountain in South America that had never been climbed and decided to climb it, Alpine-style. That means two guys tied together by a long line. Things go wrong. Lines are cut, legs break, lips flake off, ice shatters like a windshield, fuel is used up, frost gets bitten, and starvation, dehydration, and hypothermia all take turns. Caves, tunnels, fields of broken stones. The movie is rated R because, in several moments of crisis, the climbers say exactly what I would say. Beyond that, I’ll leave the movie to disclose.
“Touching the Void” is the work of documentarian Kevin Macdonald (the TV documentary “Being Mick”), using not only the book “Touching the Void,” written by one of the two climbers, but with both Yates and Simpson’s supervision. For close shots, where we can see the climbers’ faces, actors Nicholas Aaron and Brendan Mackey have been used and the Alps stand-in for South America. For the wide exteriors we get the original mountain itself, partially scaled by two master climbers, sometimes with the real Yates and Simpson. Sequences of the two men holding themselves up with one ax, then digging in with the next, then switching, are not hyped or overblown. But “Touching the Void” could have been even more effective and terrifying if takes of the climbers had been lengthened, if we could have a better idea of their rhythm while watching them working over vast drops.
“Touching the Void’s” genius and the infuriating distraction are one in the same: the movie’s recreations are combined with interviews of Simpson and Yates. The movie is at once their adventure and the reflection, commentary, and the existential meaning behind it. Reflecting on their separation during the storm, both men talk casually of the other being dead and of the other’s corpse. Out of his mind with injury, Simpson is defenseless when an annoying pop song invades his brain. Trapped with a broken leg, he reflects that he has always wondered if he would call out to God in his final terror. The mountain is not a malevolent force, but the ultimate example of an uncaring, indifferent universe driven only by the clockwork of sun, sky, orbit, and plate tectonics. The “Void” is not just the empty space where climbers meet their doom, but some inner space adjacent to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” some truth about ourselves that we may not like, but there it is. But as the movie’s editing pattern keeps us from feeling the rhythm of the climb as best we could, so too does the constant jumping between the event and the reflection on the event.
The movie’s other flaw is that the theatrical release of “Touching the Void” only contains half the story. The DVD extras are almost invaluable to understanding what the men went through, who they were when they came down the mountain, and who they are now. The extras also contain the nearly farcical continuing predicament of the injured climber, involving mules with broken saddles and uncooperative doctors. My point is that the two pieces—the climb and the thoughts on the climb—are never made to quite fit together. The first is thrilling and the second is fascinating, and I wouldn’t dream of jettisoning one in favor of the other. But one wishes they could be combined more organically.
These are trifles when we consider how hard “Touching the Void” punches us in the gut. There are dozens of so-called “horror” directors who have not made anything as adjectly terrifying as the work of cinematographer Mike Eley. If his name doesn’t appear on the list of Oscar nominees in March then maybe we really do live in an uncaring, indifferent cosmos driven only by sun, sky, orbit, and plate tectonics. “Touching the Void” is the best looking movie of 2004, so far, and it is everything an adventure movie should be: outer terror and inner terror. I have no more inclination to see the depths of the soul that these men have seen than I have to climb so high and scary a mountain.
Finished July 27, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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