Death Trips Inc.
Climb every mountain, film every scene.

By Dennis Harvey

"Armchair travel" means vicariously sampling people and places you wish you could encounter in real life. "Armchair near death-experience travel" is vicariously sampling places you can't believe anyone would want to visit. Defining that subgenre is Touching the Void, a new movie adapted – at last – from guy-who-really-should-have-died Joe Simpson's classic 1988 bum-adventure memoir. Of course, his story is an incredible triumph over impossible odds. But as a viewer who actually enjoys grueling, steep hikes but draws the line when falling equals death, I couldn't help thinking, "These dumb suckers were sooooooo lucky!" from the opening titles to the final credit crawl.

Though there have been some very good ones, mountaineering documentaries generally suffer from the fact that you aren't there, while dramatized ones are either physically unconvincing or have jaw-dropping stunts but wooden characters (K2). At one point Sally Field (!) was hoping to produce a Void (no, not her body of work) starring Tom Cruise; fortunately, we were spared Top Gun meeting Aspen Extreme.

Hitherto a notable nonfiction director (One Day in September, portraits of Errol Morris, Donald Cammell, and Howard Hawks), Kevin Macdonald chose to realize this oft-proposed project as a mix of documentary and reenactment, which brings its own problems but overall works pretty well. Thus Simpson and his hiking partner Simon Yates alternate telling the tale in talking-head style while two actors (Brendan Mackey and Nicholas Aaron) register varying degrees of panic, exhaustion, and horror high in the Alps (standing in for the Andes).

The two men were 25 and 21, respectively, when they decided to climb the 21,000-foot Siula Grande – the only mountain left in its range that had never been "conquered." With a fair amount of experience on the actual Alps behind them, they opted to do it "Alpine style," carrying the most minimal supplies, not expecting to build successive rest camps. This approach leaves "no margin for error." Surely the mountain, with its untested and unstable surfaces (mostly vertical) of ice and sugar-powdery snow, had error written all over it.

The going up is bad, with much scaling of sheer, icy cliff faces. Going down (when 80 percent of the sport's accidents happen) is much worse, however, as surrounding clouds create white-out blindness, the windchill factor drops to 80 below, and their gas supply for melting snow into drinking water runs out. Then Simpson takes a fall, ramming one leg right into his knee socket. Ow. Yates opts to lower him down the slope one 150-foot rope length at a time, pretty much the only option apart from "Good luck, mate."

As if the excruciating pain from his slide-battered broken limb weren't enough, Simpson loses control and plunges down an 80-foot drop to dangle over an even deeper crevasse, where Yates can neither see him nor hear him. Eventually Yates decides to do the unthinkable and cuts the rope, figuring his companion must already be dead. (This won Yates no end of flack from the climbing community back home, although Simpson admits that under the circumstances he would have done the same.)

I'll spare you further plot points re: how the men – who naturally lived to tell the tale, both in fact writing several Greatest Hits of Mountain-Climbing Fiascoes tomes each – managed to make it back. Neither of them is a particularly vivid on-camera storyteller, whatever their virtues in print. The actors are good but pretty nonverbal, understandably – probably the longest stretch of scripted dialogue is Simpson's double screaming, "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Fuck! Fuck! Fuuuuuck!" when the odds of survival appear most infinitesimal.

It's actually at this point, when Simpson is all by himself for four endless days, literally crawling in what might well be the wrong direction, that Touching the Void becomes really involving. Macdonald's hitherto straightforward presentation begins mimicking the disorienting moods brought on by extreme cold, thirst, frostbite, and no longer being able to discern between consciousness and its opposite. (Just what that sudden burst of a Boney M. pop tune is doing here, however, I can't tell ya.)

By the end I was wishing I'd brought a down comforter and a second warm body to watch this with me. In fact the film's most poignant moment is when the rather unemotional-in-retrospect Simpson admits his prime thought was simply "I wanted to be with somebody when I died." Me, I'd like to play it safe and share proximity with at least a few thousand somebodies – total strangers, friendly health professionals, weeping intimates – when that time comes.

'Touching the Void' opens Fri/6 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.