‘They watched us arrive. They will watch us leave’

Mountain

It may seem petty to fault a film for being too beautiful, but that’s the biggest problem with Mountain, a gorgeous documentary about the ways in which humans relate to the world’s highest places — by climbing them, skiing down them and sometimes jumping off them, on a wingsuit and a prayer.

The images are stunning, but they’d be even more so on an Imax or similar largescale screen. And the orchestral accompaniment would no doubt sound better live, as it was when Jennifer Peedom’s film premièred at the Sydney Opera House in her home country last June.

The film’s collaborators include Robert MacFarlane, an English travel writer who penned Mountains of the Mind in 2003, and has long had a fascination with the ways in which we relate to the landscape. His sparse words are spoken on the screen by the baritone voice of Willem Dafoe, whose knack for narration was made clear by last year’s wonderful doc Do Donkeys Act?

Here he is forced to veer awkwardly between the prosaic and the poetic. In one breath he’ll comment on mountain stunts, “driven by big brands and online views,” or of the annual pilgrimage to Everest: “This isn’t climbing anymore; it’s queuing.” Then he’ll suddenly rhapsodize about how mountains are formed over the eons: “Not waves of water but waves of stone ... They watched us arrive. They will watch us leave.”

But in spite of the sometimes lofty turns of phrase, Mountain is most awe-inspiring in its quieter moments; the shot of a wire walker, suspended improbably between peaks, or of a group of BASE jumpers gathered in a man-made web like collegial spiders. (Though frustratingly, we never learn who any of these intrepid thrill-seekers are, or even where; the film was shot all over Earth.)

Ultimately, however, the real reason to watch Mountain, despite its shortcomings, is a simple one: Because it’s there.

STRANGER THAN FICTION FILMS A scene from the movie The Mountain.