10 features into their directorial partnership — featuring nine documentaries — Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi return to the place of their initial collaboration: the Himalayas. But where that earlier film documented the first ascent of the Shark’s Fin on Meru Central, the duo’s return tackles nothing less than the mother of all mountains. The resulting film, Everest: The Other Side — a title which immediately feels like a logical endpoint to Vasarhelyi and Chin’s documentary interests — sets out to follow world-class ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson as they pursue their dream of summiting the North Face of Everest, before strapping on their decks and skiing right back down. But when tragedy strikes — captured on film and put to screen, in a move sure to inspire condemnation on ethical grounds across of swath of viewers — what at first seemed destined to be another portrait of extreme athletes of uncommon ambition and underreactive amygdalas transmogrifies — by necessity — into an altogether more barbed text.
In many ways, Everest: The Other Side functions as a call-and-response with Free Solo. Not only did that earlier film invoke viewer anxiety in its documentation of Alex Honnold’s death defiance, but it also pursued a discursive consideration of the ability of such athletes to find balance between personal fulfillment through their grey matter-increasing acts and the toll this takes on the people they are closest to. In Vasarhelyi and Chin’s latest, this thread gets pulled more fully — and self-reflexively. As viewers’ thirst for these kinds of documentary projects becomes more insatiable, it was inevitable that the visceral charge of what if would eventually find its way to the more sobering when. But The Other Side goes further to interrogate not just the effect that such pursuits have on those pulled into the orbit of individuals with such extreme, single-minded desires — ones wherein the goalposts are always moving and the stakes always raising — but also when personal support, and especially the resources of a successful filmmaking team, begin to cross over into enablement. Of course, this avenue of inquiry is mostly left to the realm of philosophical ether rather than explicit excavation, but one crucial scene — in which Vasarhelyi (in her only on-screen moment) questions Chin on the number of athletes they have shared a dinner table with who are now dead — functions to clarify the larger project here. (That Chin and Vasarhelyi filed for divorce during the final year of Everest’s filming offers further extra-textual argument that this specific scene is more crux than coincidence.)
The tragic circumstances of its creation mean that, emotionally, psychologically, and structurally, The Other Side is a tale of two films: one that wasn’t and one that was raised from the ashes. But as an aesthetic document, it’s a fully realized vision that delivers arguably the richest photography in the directors’ oeuvre. Intentionally foregoing the modern nature documentary’s penchant for saturating the screen with endless vista interstitials, images of places so beautiful that a baby wielding an iPhone 5 couldn’t degrade their splendor, Vasarhelyi and Chin keep their drones relatively tight to their canvas and their GoPro footage trained on the gritty minutiae of the climb. Whether an intentional rebuke of the romantic commercialization of mountaineering that has led to unnecessary death and catastrophe or the result of Chin’s climber’s eye prioritizing awe for toil and technique over postcard-approved imagery, it’s all to The Other Side’s benefit. There’s an easy elegance to the film’s compositions, whether capturing the snow spray kicked up by precise jump turns, the peak-filled alien perspective as glimpsed from the summit of the world’s tallest mountain, or the intimate embrace of two men bundled in too much winter gear. And all of this is punctuated during the film’s climactic final stretch, wherein grainy footage of the climbers dotting the imposing landscape is introduced to stunning effect, shocking the viewer from the cocooning safety of crisp digital footage. That’s not to say that the filmmakers don’t capture moments of profound beauty, but rather that Everest: The Other Side isn’t a film about pretty things, and the directors’ savviest choice here is to reflect that understanding in its visual design.
Still, it’s tough to shake the impression that something far thornier has been left mostly unexplored. In the end, there is grief to count and joy to measure, but film’s most essential questions are left largely to the imagination. Early in the film, when discussing the reality of being both a mother and an adventurer whose very job is life-risking, Nelson responds along the lines of what else am I supposed to do? This question’s rhetorical nature, its matter-of-factness, speaks certainly to a certain personal, psychological truth, but not an objective one that maps easily to other consciousnesses. Contained within it, then, and gyring out into all manner of fascinating paths, are questions: of autonomy within the sphere of the domestic and the delicate hold we have on our own personhood; of the mystery of the self, as understood from within and from without; and, most pertinent to directors’ larger project and glimpsed in snatches in their latest, of the limits of our curiosity with regard to mental hygiene when the outlet is imbued with such spectacle. If, then, The Other Side still mostly succeeds despite these deficits, it comes with the asterisk that Vasarhelyi and Chin only dip their toes into the more interesting waters they make clear they know they should be swimming in. The question moving forward is, after Everest, are there any more mountains for them to climb?
DIRECTORS: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin; CAST: Jim Morrison, Hilaree Nelson, Jimmy Chin; DISTRIBUTOR: Walt Disney Pictures; IN THEATERS: October 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 55 min.
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