San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A love story ends, but passion for planet continues
As someone whose roles as a celebrated documentarian and a professional climber often intersect, Jimmy Chin has a lot of experience filming people he’s close to. He knows how to navigate being both a friend and an objective storyteller.
“Meru,” the 2015 debut film he and his wife, Chai Vasarhelyi, made in 2015, followed Chin’s highly technical ascent of a 21,000-foot Himalayan peak with his close friend and mentor, Conrad Anker. “Free Solo,” for which Chin and Vasarhelyi received the 2019 Academy Award for best documentary, chronicled the highstakes unassisted climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan by rock climber Alex Honnold, Chin’s longtime friend.
So Chin knows what it’s like to have what he calls an “insider’s perspective.” But he says it’s his latest film, “Wild Life” — in theaters now, and available to stream on Disney+ on Friday, May 26 — that magnified his sense of responsibility in telling stories he’s close to, with accurate evenhandedness as well as exquisite care and understanding. The main characters aren’t just friends, they’re people Chin has called his “personal heroes.”
“Wild Life” is a stirring portrait of world-renowned conservationists Doug and Kristine “Kris” Tompkins, and their close inner circle. Kris, 72, the founding CEO of Patagonia, today runs Tompkins Conservation, the world’s largest land-conservation nonprofit. The organization has
protected close to 15 million acres of land and 30 million acres of ocean, and driven the creation of an astounding 15 national parks in Latin America.
Her husband, entrepreneur Doug Tompkins, who died in 2015, founded the North Face in San Francisco in 1966 (the Grateful Dead played and Hells Angels ran security at its legendary North Beach store opening). He went on to found another iconic San Franciscobased fashion brand, Esprit, with his first wife, Susie Tompkins, before cashing out to devote himself to land philanthropy.
Doug’s lifelong friend and climbing partner, Yvon Chouinard (Kris’ neighbor growing up in Southern California), founded Patagonia, like the North Face one of the world’s most successful and enduring outdoor brands.
“Making a deeply personal film about people you’ve looked up to for a long time, an incredible circle of friends, does carry additional weight and adds a certain amount of pressure,” Chin told The Chronicle recently via video call with Vasarhelyi from their home in Jackson Hole, Wyo. “Sometimes I did wonder if I was too close.”
That proximity paid off by providing the filmmakers with access to people who are exceedingly private, as well as in conveying Chin’s deep regard
for an older generation of idealistic eco-champions who have lived on their own terms, questioning and at times rejecting traditional notions of success to make the world a better place.
“I wouldn’t have said yes to making this film with anybody else but Jimmy and Chai,” Kris said by phone from New York. “I really trust them.”
A few days later, following a preview screening of “Wild Life” in San Rafael, she said her main concern in allowing her life story to be presented onscreen, including through her darkest days following Doug’s death, was that Chin and Vasarhelyi not unduly glorify her.
“I didn’t want it to be too careful,” Kris said. “I was always worried not that it wouldn’t be honest if somebody did (a film on me), but that it would be too sweet — and we’re not very sweet,” she said with a laugh.
“So I gave them everything,” she added. That included 200,000 photographs and 26 years of her handwritten journals.
“Wild Life” is a feat of narrative assemblage, a cohesive whole told through interrelated stories. It tells Kris and Doug’s love story, recounting how the two met in midlife and then left their lucrative corporate careers behind, moving to Chile and dedicating their lives to eco-philanthropy. It’s also a business
story about unconventional entrepreneurs and an environmental conservation story, “showing that people can show up and do something about climate change, the existential question of our time,” said Vasarhelyi.
Kris, both onscreen and in conversation, is determined,
adventurous at heart and undeterred in the mission she and her husband shared to protect as much wild, undeveloped land as possible. “To hold back the onslaught,” she said, of a threatening trifecta: rising human population, a rise in global consumption and a depletion of natural resources.
“We’re losing wilderness at the rate of 40 million acres a year,” Kris says in the documentary.
It’s been an uphill battle from the start. In voice-over in “Wild Life,” she reads painful passages from her journals during her and Doug’s early years in Chile, when their audacious plans to buy up large parcels of land to preserve them from development or depletion were met with suspicion. They were called “ecobarons” and worse by Chileans skeptical of the wealthy foreigners in a country with a history of corporate land grabs.
“The first time I met Kris and Doug, the idea of what they were doing really blew my mind,” remembered Chin. “Creating national parks? I have to admit, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. But I knew that it was something extraordinary.”
He and Vasarhelyi “flirted with the idea” of making a film on the Tompkinses for years — until Doug died in a freak kayaking accident in Chile in 2015.
They witnessed, as they show in the film, how Kris, overcome with grief, managed to find her voice and re-engage with life, even doubling down on her commitment to land conservation.
To Vasarhelyi, the film came into focus as being foremost about a woman who “on the brink, picks herself up and reinvents herself. That became the most compelling element.”
In “Wild Life,” recounting those first gut-wrenching days following Doug’s death, Kris describes the experience of receiving a bold note from a
friend just 10 days after he passed, urging her to make a choice: “You can tell everybody about this great life and love you had, or you can go to work and don’t stop.”
“That note was freezing, icy water on my face,” Kris recalled, “but I knew she was right. It was very clarifying. It brought into sharp focus that it almost wasn’t my decision to make. You can’t leave something midstream.”
At a Smith Rafael Film Center screening of the film on Tuesday, April 18, she told the audience that she hopes the film inspires others to stand up in their own ways to protect the wild places and ecosystems they love and to “advocate for the future of human and nonhuman life.”
“I don’t care if you’re in a small village in northeastern Argentina or you’re sitting here in San Rafael,” she said. “We cannot sit on the sidelines. It’s boring to sit on the sidelines anyway.”