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"Free Solo," a Documentary About the Hardest Climb in History
(disclaimer: Film Editor Bob Eisenhardt is a friend of mine)
The New Yorker:
“Free Solo,” a new National Geographic documentary, examines how and why a sane man named Alex Honnold climbed a three-thousand-foot wall of rock in Yosemite National Park last summer without a rope. Rock climbing without safety gear is known as “free solo,” and it has killed plenty of élite climbers through the years, including Honnold’s friends. His free solo of El Capitan in Yosemite was, according to a piece in the Times, “one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever.” But to Honnold, who is thirty-three, it was something else: a fascinating puzzle, years in the making, in which to both lose himself and be found. Its completion brought about an existential contentment that, the film suggests, had long eluded a man whose own girlfriend calls him “strange.”
I watched the film last month, at a New York screening, sitting next to Honnold. It was his first viewing, too. (Earlier that day, he’d scouted a New Jersey skyscraper, which he eventually climbed halfway up without ropes. The discomfort of peering into bedrooms, rather than a fear of toeing rain-slickened windowsills, stopped him from going farther.) Honnold slouched in the back row, squirming during non-climbing scenes: watching himself navigate his relationship with his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, a life coach whom he met at a book signing, was harder to bear than the shots of him clinging to rock nubs thousands of feet above a valley. Honnold is single-minded to the extreme, and he dismisses the “cozy life.” McCandless, meanwhile, has the reasonable hope of being factored into his free-soloing. At one point, sitting in the Sprinter van that is their de-facto home, she says, “Would putting me into the equation actually ever change anything?” “No,” he answers. “But I appreciate your concerns.”
These relationship dynamics—which, to a lesser extent, include Honnold’s mom and pals like Tommy Caldwell, who calls climbing with Honnold “a vice . . . like smoking cigarettes”—carry the film to the foot of the granite wall on June 3, 2017, when, with little warning, Honnold chalks up and gives the thing a go. The final twenty minutes of “Free Solo,” stunningly shot from a fly-on-the-rock-wall perspective, are riveting, regardless of one’s grasp of “jugs,” “chimneys,” or “crimps.” I lightly punched Honnold at one point—as he did a “thumb press” two thousand feet up—to make sure that he was there. It’s remarkable that he is, and this film of Herzogian ambition, frightening to all involved in its making, does him justice.
I watched the film last month, at a New York screening, sitting next to Honnold. It was his first viewing, too. (Earlier that day, he’d scouted a New Jersey skyscraper, which he eventually climbed halfway up without ropes. The discomfort of peering into bedrooms, rather than a fear of toeing rain-slickened windowsills, stopped him from going farther.) Honnold slouched in the back row, squirming during non-climbing scenes: watching himself navigate his relationship with his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, a life coach whom he met at a book signing, was harder to bear than the shots of him clinging to rock nubs thousands of feet above a valley. Honnold is single-minded to the extreme, and he dismisses the “cozy life.” McCandless, meanwhile, has the reasonable hope of being factored into his free-soloing. At one point, sitting in the Sprinter van that is their de-facto home, she says, “Would putting me into the equation actually ever change anything?” “No,” he answers. “But I appreciate your concerns.”
These relationship dynamics—which, to a lesser extent, include Honnold’s mom and pals like Tommy Caldwell, who calls climbing with Honnold “a vice . . . like smoking cigarettes”—carry the film to the foot of the granite wall on June 3, 2017, when, with little warning, Honnold chalks up and gives the thing a go. The final twenty minutes of “Free Solo,” stunningly shot from a fly-on-the-rock-wall perspective, are riveting, regardless of one’s grasp of “jugs,” “chimneys,” or “crimps.” I lightly punched Honnold at one point—as he did a “thumb press” two thousand feet up—to make sure that he was there. It’s remarkable that he is, and this film of Herzogian ambition, frightening to all involved in its making, does him justice.
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