'Touching the Void' plunges into climbing nightmare
So why does real-life mountaineering — with its achingly stirring landscapes, deadly high-altitude drama and ever-present cast of surly vagabonds — inspire mostly cartoonish action flicks starring the likes of Sylvester Stallone?
Fortunately, director Kevin Macdonald's "Touching the Void" bears little resemblance to any climbing film that's come before. His simple and intimate retelling of one of climbing's classic and most excruciating accident stories — British climber Joe Simpson's 3-1/2-day crawl (with no food, no water and a shattered leg) down the flanks of South America's Siula Grande after his climbing partner left him for dead in 1985 — launches this picture into a lonely category: the great mountain-climbing movie.
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Part re-creation, part documentary, "Touching the Void," based on Simpson's best-selling book of the same title, is such a horrific and wildly dramatic tale it could easily have been ruined by anything other than understatement.
But, from the outset, the filmmaker establishes perfect pitch. Climbing "was fun," Simpson says, struggling to explain his climbing obsession. Of course, "every once in awhile something went wildly wrong. And then it wasn't."
Slipping effortlessly between on-camera talking heads and voice-overs, Simpson and partner Simon Yates narrate their own story as actors, their faces mostly in shadow, reconstruct it.
Ambitious climbers in their mid-20s, trained on peaks in the Alps, they'd set out to summit an unclimbed peak in the Peruvian Andes. Pulling through precarious pillows of snow and vertical ice, captured beautifully by long camera shots, they reach the top exhausted — "knackered," Simpson says.
Starting down, Simpson falls, breaking his leg so severely the bone is driven through the kneecap. The pair is tied together above 20,000 feet, out of food and out of stove fuel to melt snow for water.
Simpson can't walk, and a blizzard is blowing in, so Yates begins lowering him. With night approaching, he unknowingly drops Simpson over a ledge where he hangs, unable to climb up or down. Yates, holding on to him from above, begins to slide toward the abyss himself.
Finally, a mountaineering movie that's not about machismo and bluster; just two friends, in a desperate situation, facing nothing but bad decisions — the stuff of real life.
Thinking Simpson is already dead, and seeing no way out without killing himself, too, Yates cuts the rope — plunging himself into a nightmare of guilt, and Simpson into a hellish fight for survival.
Yates heads back to camp and, for the next several days, we follow Simpson as he drags his weary, broken body through tunnels of ice, across crevasse-creased glaciers and over slick boulders.
It's a battle of will told, luckily for us, by a climber who proves to be a painstakingly honest writer.
"I thought I'd be tougher than that," Simpson says, as we see him break down in tears, blubbering profanity. As water trickles all around him, he begins losing touch with reality, so thirsty at one point he's convinced he can "smell" water.
He later admits he continued, not because he thought he'd survive, but because "I think I wanted to be with somebody when I died."
Novelists like to say that fiction captures quiet truths nonfiction simply can't. "Touching the Void" offers up a powerful counterargument.
Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com