Release Date: January 23, 2004
Starring: Joe Simpson, Simon Yates, Richard Hawking, Nicholas Aaron, Brendan Mackey
Directed by: Kevin Macdonald
Distributed by: IFC Films
MPAA Rating: R (language)
I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but for at least the first half-hour of the outstanding docudrama Touching the Void, which is about the incredible story of British mountain climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates and their perilous attempt to summit the 21,000-foot peak of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, I was convinced that the footage I was seeing was real. Naturally, this is impossible, since Simpson and Yates’s story takes place in June 1985 and Touching the Void was filmed in 2003, and I’m not sure why I was so easily duped -- perhaps because of some half-remembered article about the movie’s production, which was just as harrowing -- but my experience is probably and more importantly a fitting testimony to the suffocating, jaw-dropping, nail-biting atmosphere of realism that pervades the movie. This is no stuffy PBS or BBC documentary. For that almost impossibly large percentage of the world’s population who will never set foot in the Peruvian Andes, this is as close to real thing as you can get from the comfort of your local theater.
“We climbed because it was fun,” says Simpson, by way of introducing the film. “And every now and then it went wildly wrong. And then it wasn’t.” In retrospect, this is a classic example of the dry British understatement favored by our heroes, because saying that Simpson and Yates’s adventure went wrong is like saying that the Super Bowl is just another football game. The pair, who were 21 and 25 years old, respectively, sought to climb Siula Grande by way of its nearly 90-degree western face, an ascent never before (and never since) completed. This they did, remarkably, within three days, and were beginning their descent when a bad fall left Simpson with a broken leg.
For a while, Yates tried lowering Simpson down the side of the mountain on a 300-foot line, but before long a blinding snowstorm developed, and Yates, having lost sight of Simpson, cut the line, believing he was dead. In fact he was still very much alive, and even after a broken leg, a substantial fall into a pitch-black crevasse, and days without food or water, he managed to make it back to base camp. The story of his survival -- which is related through interviews with Yates, Simpson, and their traveling companion, Richard Hawking, and reenacted by a trio of actors cast to resemble the younger versions of the real-life figures -- is a testament to the limitlessness of human endurance, one of the most incredible and astounding true stories you will ever see.
Much credit is due to Kevin Macdonald, the director, for his reconstructions of Yates and Simpson’s expedition, which were so extensive that they later prompted debate over whether Touching the Void should be categorized as a documentary. One of the many problems with making a movie about mountain climbing -- aside from all of the treacherous locations and fickle conditions and logistical stumbling blocks -- is that we live in a brave, new, technologically advanced age in which we have explored the most inaccessible locations known to man: Mt. Everest, the Mariana Trench, Tranquility Bay. Helicopters will take us above the mountains in a matter of minutes. Recapturing viewers’ lost innocence is not easy. But Macdonald has some neat tricks that go a long way toward achieving that end. He loves to do a long, slow zoom out to reveal the figures of Simpson and Yates (played, primarily, in the reenactments by Brendan Mackey and Nicholas Aaron) as insects on the massive face of Siula Grande, and he also favors a seemingly endless pan up from the mountain base to its jagged ridge. The western face, buffeted by gale-force winds and perpetually clouded in a sugary whiteout, is simply described: big, and dangerous. No one but a pair of cocky twentysomethings would even think to climb it. You get the feeling that Simpson and Yates are modern-day Icaruses, begging to be punished for flying too close to the sun.
As it turns out, Yates and Simpson are more than just a pair of thrill-seekers. Champion mountain climbers that they are, they have an innate tendency to face setbacks with ingenuity and persistence. In fact their biggest challenge is not climbing Siula Grande or getting down off the top of it; this, you are quite sure, they can handle. What really throws them for a loop is that rare and unwanted moment when both of them must confront their own mortality. They speak of it briefly and not altogether seriously when they are on the way up the mountain: The two climbers are tied to each other by a nylon rope, and if one falls, the other will quite likely go with him. But such a fate is involuntary, unexpected, and over in moment. It does not compare to the instant when Simpson’s life is literally hanging in the balance, and Yates decides to cut their tether to save his own life. Of course, at the time, Yates had no idea whether Simpson was dead or alive, but in retrospect it the clearly the sort of decision that would take the courage of a hundred men.
Equally amazing is Simpson’s part of the story, which dominates the movie after Yates cuts the rope. The fall -- which he miraculously survived, broken leg and all -- left him in a crevasse with seemingly no way out. The hole through which he had fallen was 80 feet up and protected by an icy overhang: as Simpson tells it, an impossible climb even with two good legs. His wildly counterintuitive but ultimately fortuitous decision to go deeper into the crevasse is the sort of decision that nine in 10 men would not make. But this is Simpson, and it saved his life. You’ve got to keep making decisions, he says, even if they’re the wrong ones.
At a certain point, even a story as incredible as this runs out of steam, and with Touching the Void that moment comes when both men have made it off the mountain and Simpson is dragging himself back to their base camp. But this is over an hour and a half into the movie, which is a considerable length of time for a suspense story in which we know the outcome (Simpson and Yates, after all, narrate the story nearly 20 years after the fact). It is also a lot longer than it would be if this were a fictional film. If it were, critics and viewers alike would pan it as wildly implausible. No way does Simpson suffer a broken leg, an 80-foot fall, and days of hypothermia and dehydration and live to tell about it. Except he did, holding onto his life with nothing but his own two hands. I have often wondered just how real life can so tenaciously and consistently outdo the wildest imaginations in Hollywood. Now I know. It’s because there are men like Yates and Simpson in it.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)