Risk vs. reward
ONE OF THE BEST DOCS OF 2018 TRACES FEARLESS CLIMBER’S PATH
The 1989 film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier opens with Captain Kirk climbing El Capitan, a 3,000-foot granite cliff in “Yosemite, Earth.” He is halfway up, without any safety gear, when Mr. Spock shows up (via rocket boots) and tells him: “I regret to inform you that the record for freeclimbing El Capitan is in no danger of being broken.”
When that movie came out, the record, then recently set by set by Todd Skinner and Paul Piana, stood at nine days. But last summer, in a feat more exciting than anything Trek can dish out, it was smashed by Alex Honnold. Like the fictional starship captain, he used no safety gear, and climbed alone. He made it to the top in under four hours.
El Capitan is a ridiculously tall rock, more than 11/2 times as high as the CN Tower. Climbing it has been likened to an Olympic event. Free climbing means if you make a mistake you don’t get silver; you die.
But Alex knows no fear. That’s not a metaphor; directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (they also made the award-winning 2015 climbing doc Meru) take him to an MRI and learn that his amygdala — the part of the brain that tells us when to be afraid — is remarkably relaxed. He may be setting a trail for Captain Kirk to follow, but the crew calls him Mr. Spock.
Early in the movie, he notes that, given the choice between climbing and a girlfriend, he’d choose the former. But life isn’t so binary. Alex meets fellow outdoors enthusiast Sanni McCandless and darned if they don’t fall in love right in front of the camera. It makes for some lighthearted moments in a film that may otherwise have you forgetting to breathe as you try to use force of will to keep Alex from falling to his doom.
The genius of this film, which recently made the 15-film shortlist for the feature documentary category in the next Academy Awards, is that it is about the man first and the climb second. So we spend time with Alex and Sanni as they go shopping for a fridge, but also as Alex tries to logic his way up El Capitan in his head. There are numerous routes to choose from, none of them simple — at one point the decision is between an outcrop called The Boulder Problem and another named Teflon Corner.
We also learn that Alex’s father may have had Asperger syndrome, but for the most part the film just presents Alex as he is and lets us make what conclusions we will. In a similar spirit I offer this detail for your perusal; when I met Alex at the Toronto International Film Festival, I asked him what film had most influenced him. He didn’t have an answer, unless the question could be broadened to include television, in which case it was ... Star Trek. That’s logical. ∫∫∫∫∫
THE GENIUS OF THIS FILM ... IS THAT IT IS ABOUT THE MAN FIRST AND THE CLIMB SECOND. — CHRIS KNIGHT