January
23, 2004 | In June 1985, two young British climbers attempted to
scale the previously unclimbed west face of Siula Grande, a 21,000-foot
peak in the Peruvian Andes. Undaunted by the challenge of maneuvering
up near-vertical icefields, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates attacked the
mountain "Alpine style" - attached to each other by a rope
- and reached the summit within three days. Shortly after they started
the trip back down, however, things began to go terribly wrong.
During
a snowstorm on a high ridge, Simpson slipped and shattered his right
leg, driving his femur through his kneecap. Worse, he soon found himself
suspended in midair over a seemingly bottomless crevasse. Many feet
above him, Yates could not see or hear his friend, and feared what he
felt was dead weight at the other end of the rope. He knew that, sooner
or later, he would be pulled from his position on the mountain face
if he didn't cut himself loose from Simpson. Trouble is, he also knew
that if Simpson somehow were still alive, the fall would almost certainly
kill him. Yates paused and pondered. Then he took out his knife.
Director
Kevin Macdonald recounts the true-life drama of Simpson and Yates in
Touching the Void, an inspired hybrid of documentary and dramatic
re-creation, and the movie is so terrifically suspenseful that it often
tricks you into ignoring, or even forgetting, the obvious. Right from
the start, Macdonald makes it very clear that both Simpson and Yates
survived their ordeal. Indeed, the two men appear separately in on-camera
interviews throughout the movie, and provide alternating running commentaries
during scenes featuring actors and stunt climbers who re-create events
that no dramatist would dare to invent. (A base-camp companion, Richard
Hawking, also appears as himself and, in the re-creations, as a character.)
But
it's not so much the final destination as the harrowing journey that
Touching the Void wants to examine. Macdonald - who earned an Oscar
for One Day in September (1999), his documentary about terrorists
at the 1972 Munich Olympics - immerses his audience into his gripping
narrative by focusing with a ferocious intensity on the step-by-step,
minute-to-minute details of survival. Questions are methodically raised,
then precisely answered. Can Simpson make it to the bottom of the crevasse?
If so, how can he complete the journey back down? Can he hop? Crawl?
Move himself through sheer force of will? And what about Yates? How
will he manage his own descent? And why does he want to linger at the
base of the mountain? Is he searching his soul for a way to forgive
himself? Or is he waiting for a miracle he can't or won't dare to hope
for?
There
is no trace of self-pity or sentimentality in the commentary of the
climbers - they are paragons of clipped British understatement - and
the movie makes no attempt to mine their misadventure for spiritual
uplift or facile metaphors. Touching the Void just gives us the
facts, with stunningly persuasive skill. And very much like George Butler's
The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2001),
a similarly amazing tale of survival, it gently prods us to consider
this: For whatever reason, some men simply refuse to die.