HOT CORNER
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What: “Touching the Void.”
When: Scheduled to be released Feb. 6.
For that small but fervent group of people who climb mountains or read about those who do, Joe Simpson’s 1988 book “Touching the Void” is the bible. It has it all: action, danger, fear, machismo and -- most important -- honesty. Now, after all these years and a number of false starts because Simpson demanded the same honesty in film that he put in writing, we have “Touching the Void,” the movie.
The story is so simple, so incredible and so bluntly told, that it probably will not make a big splash in style-over-substance Hollywood. Simpson and his friend Simon Yates climb the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985.
Nobody had ever done that route successfully before. Matter of fact, nobody else has ever done it.
On the way down, Simpson falls, breaks several bones in his knee and, in the mountain-climbing world, is supposed to be a dead man the moment the first bone fractured. Yates tries to lower him down the mountain 300 feet at a time on a rope, in a driving snowstorm and at an altitude that most of us couldn’t survive for more than half an hour or so.
The movie tells the rest of the story, and it does so just as directly and bluntly as Simpson does in his classic book. It does so with Simpson and Yates telling the story to the camera, as well as two actors playing them. Director Kevin Macdonald’s device works because the real Simpson and Yates you see narrating the events are as revealing as the actors playing them up on the mountain. They are, in the film and in real life, highly complicated men whose lives were forever scorched by their time on Siula Grande.
This one may not have Sylvester Stallone, but it is a cliffhanger. A real one.
-- Bill Dwyre
