‘Free Solo’ gets adrenaline pumping
If your nerves aren’t already shot, you may want to wreck them watching “Free Solo,” a rock climbing nailbiter and art house hit about Alex Honnold, the first climber to “solo” (i.e., climb alone and without a rope) the 3,000-foot-high El Capitan, a towering 100 millionyear-old granite formation in Yosemite National Park. Can you spell vertiginous?
Whether such accomplishments are athletic feats or suicide attempts or both I’ll leave to you to decide. But in one scene, Alex gets results of a brain scan telling him he needs a lot more “stimulation” than an average person. Thus, this adrenaline junkie/super athlete, who lives in a van, sometimes with his devoted and altogether too cute girlfriend Sanni McCandless, has always sought out greater and more stimulating challenges in his rockclimbing life.
He knows the risks and knows how many have died trying. Usually, Alex and others like him solo by themselves, as the word suggests. This time, Alex has agreed to be filmed scaling the impossible heights up sheer rock faces at times virtually without foot or hand holds.
The filmmakers are Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi of the equally mind-bending 2015 truelife mountain-climbing tale “Meru.” You’ve seen scary movies before. But are you ready for the “Hollow Flake” or the “Monster Offwidth”? I don’t think you are.
Alex turns out to be the most likable “dorky loner,” who somehow got lucky enough to find a great mate. You really don’t want him to die. I must say I was troubled by the thought that the imminence of his death is a selling point here and is unavoidably exploited by making a documentary film recording his life-threatening attempt. I also have serious misgivings about the Tim McGraw tune “Gravity” attached over the end credits (I’m assuming this was the idea of producer National Geographic.) But on the whole, “Free Solo” is unforgettable.