Free Solo

The sport/art of free climbing (basically, cliff climbing without the assistance of a rope or anything other than a little bit of dust for grip) is one that seems challenging for the non-participant to understand. Why would you put yourself into incredible, impossible danger for no real benefit beyond to say that you can do it? Particularly when the consequences seem so frequently fatal. This documentary looks at one of these free climbers, Alex Honnold, whose skill is only matched by his distinct oddity. His family background is messy (a dad who committed suicide, a mother who wasn’t particularly emotional) and his current relationship reflects that difficulty in engaging with his partner – and he (and the camera crew) are very aware that his form of self-expression comes with significant risks – there’s a catalog of friends who have died in the act of pursuing what they love that appears throughout the film. And the film gets into some of the logistics of making the film – both the ethical ones (can you really just sit there and film when a guy could be going to his death) and the practical ones (does having the cameras in his line of sight make Alex’s task more difficult). It gets into the details of how this kind of climb is done, looking at the different sections that make this particular climb at El Capitain so difficult, and the combination of physical feats Alex has to pull off. And there’s distinct filmmaking skill in making such a dense, complicated task easily explicable to a general audience – with the final climbing sequence heart-stopping and tense and eventually triumphant. Oddly enough, it reminded me a little of the doco “Dancer” from two years back about the ballet dancer Sergei Polunin – similarly a physically endangering occupation that comes from a clearly damaged human being but never the less something that is fascinating to watch. – while this is a much better doco than that one, the question of “how much is the capability to perform truly exceptional physical feats worth” remains.  This is virtuosic, fascinating filmmaking.