“As emotionally-draining and powerful a documentary as you’re ever likely to see.” – Wayward Wolf.
A scene midway through Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s extraordinary documentary, Free Solo, might go some way towards explaining the apparent fearlessness of free climbing sensation, Alex Honnold.
An MRI scan reveals a remarkably low response level in Honnold’s brain to the sort of stimuli that would produce typically large response levels in you or I. Pseudoscience or not, the logical summary from such findings can only be that Alex Honnold is a man that does not spook easily.
That said, perhaps informing him that his climbing days are over and that he will be confined to a nine-to-five desk job for the rest of his days might well see his brain response levels fly off the charts!
Who knows?
The contrast between Honnold the rock-climbing van-dwelling free spirit and the Honnold whose life his lovely (and very understanding) girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, tries valiantly to harness with at least some attempt at domesticity, is marked.
And perhaps that’s the point here. The remarkable feats that this thirty-three year old gravity-defying sensation continues to achieve are certainly not borne out of any sort of conventional approach to life. The life of a rock climber or mountaineer is after all inherently selfish in nature and completely at odds with the very notion of convention.
Chin and Vasarhelyi’s fascinating film examines the relationship not only between Alex and Sanni, but just as importantly, between Alex and his camera crew, each of whom are pushed to their very emotional limits in monitoring and recording his every move, always aware that his next may very conceivably be his last.
Watching Honnold’s death-defying attempt to scale El Capitan in Yosemite – without recourse to ropes – is an excruciatingly tense and sweaty-palmed experience; such is the emotion that we can’t help but invest in this wiry, slightly odd, rather aloof yet likeable human Spiderman.
Free Solo is a stunningly shot, triumphant cinematic experience. As emotionally-draining and powerful a documentary as you’re ever likely to see.
And certainly not for the faint of heart.
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