Free Solo

I predicted the RBG would win the academy award for best documentary and given the timeliness of its topic I'm still a little surprised that it didn't win but now having watched Free Solo, directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, I can see clearly now - this is a tremendously exciting doc about the Alex Honnold's attempt to become the first person ever to free Solo - that is , climb with no ropes or external support of any kind - in a single effort scaling of el capitane (Yosemite). There have been numerous other movies about various ascents, all of them exciting to various degree (meru, the dawn wall, to name two recent ones) but none can match this one. Most documentaries are weighted down w too much explanation and too many talking heads, but this one is about the climb and its terrors - and you feel as if you're on the edge of death at virtually every moment. We get to know just enough about Honnold and what drives him and even what frightens him and of course the film is about him but it's also about something more grand - denying the impossible, living in the shadow of death. Hard as it is to scale el cap under any conditions let alone a free solo climb, it must have been nearly as difficult to film this perhaps fatal enterprise over many years; we get a sense of the difficulty - camera crews themselves suspended by intricate and maybe dangerous roping - without the technical difficulties ever intruding on the main story line. Note that one of honnold's key support personnel was tommy Caldwell, whose own daring climb was the subject of the nearly contemporaneous Dawn Wall, also worth watching.

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