Free Solo

Although the common viewer will find the documentary Free Solo (2018) very frightening, there are only a handful of viewers in the whole world who can appreciate just how terrifying the images caught on film really are -- these are professional rock climbers approaching the caliber of the movie's protagonist Alex Honnoldt.  Honnoldt sets out to climb the 3000 foot rock face of El Capitan in the Yosemite Valley "free solo".  This means that he makes the ascent without ropes using only his hands and feet and a little pouch of chalk to keep his fingers from getting slick with sweat.  Of course, any error whatsoever in his attack on the enormous, sheer (and, even, overhanging) rock face will result in his gruesome death.  At certain moments in the film recording this ascent, the world class rock climbers employing telescopes to watch Honnoldt's climb are overcome with horror and turn away from the lens, unable to bear what they are seeing -- with a sick look, the expert rock climber closes his eyes and paces nervously back and forth, too frightened to look through the eyepiece.  I suspect that only rock climbers of very high achievement can appreciate this film -- it's a little watching someone perform one of Beethoven's late piano sonatas:  clearly, the task is herculean, but only another world-class pianist can understand the true agony required to accomplish the performance.  The sequence that most terrifies the experts is something called "The Boulder Problem", a pitch about 600 feet above the Yosemite valley.  Honnoldt has to cross grip the sheer granite wall, shifting one hand over another to catch at grips too small for the camera to show them.   (He has found these grips by polishing the rock face with a toothbrush and, then, inspecting it at six inches range.) All the while, his right foot is en pointe, like a ballet dancer, toes jammed against the vertical rock and seemingly gripping by friction alone.  From this exposed position, Honnoldt has to execute a "karate kick" -- that is kicking with his left leg as far as he can reach to wedge his foot against a tiny prism of rock about the height of his ear.  I've made a couple inconsequential rock climbs, both in Interstate Park near the Dalles of the St. Croix River and watching this maneuver made me feel dizzy -- I can only imagine the nausea felt by the other professional rock climbers when Honnoldt "solves" the "boulder problem" in this way.  (Our anxiety is enhanced by the fact that we have seen Honnoldt practicing on this part of the wall while suspended in a rope harness and seen him fall time and time again.)

Free Solo documents Honnoldt's two year effort to scale El Capitan.  He spends hundreds of hours practicing on the rock wall and, then, attempting the free climb in the Fall of 2016, becomes frightened and "bails" as he says.  He returns the next Spring, practices for another six weeks, or so and, then, undertakes the climb in early June 2017.  The ascent is documented by an experienced team of rock climbers tied-off at various stages of the climb.  Their presence becomes one of the dilemmas that the film documents.  Will Honnoldt take unnecessary chances because he is being filmed?  Are they contributing to his danger?  In fact, members of film crew agonize, that they may be, in effect, aiding him to commit suicide.  (The film is directed for National Georgraphic by Elizabeth Chai-Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, a Mankato native, both of whom directed the splendid Meru, another mountaineering documentary released several years ago.)  Another strand in the picture is Honnoldt's odd, off-putting affect -- there is, to be blunt, something wrong with him.  (In one attempt to discover what this might be, an MRI of his brain is undertaken:  not surprisingly, the study shows that Honnoldt displays little activity in his amygdala, the fear center in the brain:  scary images that would elicit a electrical storm in the amygdala in others seem to have no effect on him at all.)  Honnoldt was raised by a mother who taught French and spoke to her children only in that language.  His father, it is said, suffered from something that might now be defined as Asperger's syndrome and seems to have been a difficult person -- the film is reticent about him (he is deceased) and Honnoldt describes his childhood as unhappy and lonely.  As a result he feels a desire to accomplish perfection and, thus, devote himself to the deadly and completely solitary sport of free solo rock climbing -- an endeavor that has no grand old men:  without exception, they are all dead, killed in falls..  Complicating the film is the fact that Honnoldt has acquired a girlfriend, a little blonde woman who is, seemingly, completely sane and (as the cliché would have it) "cute as a bug."   Of course, Honnoldt's derring-do inspired their relationship at the outset but once she sees first-hand that her boyfriend is launched on an apparently suicidal quest to climb El Capitan free solo she begins to have serious reservations about his commitment to her.  She's right to express these feelings -- Honnoldt says without equivocation that he prefers the thrill of free solo climbing to anything that his girlfriend can provide to him.  Scenes with the girlfriend are funny and cringe-worthy -- in one episode, they shop for a house in Las Vegas because it's close "to some really big walls" that Honnoldt can climb.  He's been living out of his van, so-called "dirt bagging," for nine years, and says, when she starts talking about carpet colors and furniture, that he doesn't care about any of this and, in fact, won't need a bed because he can simply sleep on the carpeted floor.  She later confronts him and calls him an asshole.   Similar, tension occurs when they go shopping for a refrigerator -- despite the fact that his climbing and endorsements have made him prosperous ("I would guess I make as much as a moderately successful dentist" he tells some students at a high school forum, Honnoldt is fantastically cheap.)  As if passively hoping to deter him, his girlfriend is instrumental in two falls -- one of which causes thoracic compression fractures and the other which results in a badly sprained ankle.   These mishaps cause Honnoldt to reconsider the relationship with his girlfriend -- perhaps, she is, after all, a jinx. 

What lifts this film above the mere documentation of an extraordinary and terrifying feat of determination is the care with which the filmmakers detail the relationship between Honnoldt and girlfriend as well as the others in his life, most of whom try to persuade  him to not make the climb.  Although he expects to die, Honnoldt finally attempts the ascent and this sequence is tremendously gripping, shot from mid-air perches and using drones to bring the viewer to within a few feet of the climber's rock face choreography.  It's astonishing and truly frightening.  When the climb is completed, Honnoldt seems very happy for about a half-hour,  Then, we see him brooding.  What's next?   I am reminded of the ineffable lines from Mike Leigh's great film about Gilbert and Sullivan, Topsy-Turvy (1999) -- after the success of The Mikado, Gilbert says:  "There's something inherently disappointing about success."