The beachfront Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido got a taste of high altitude as the Venice Film festival opened with a screening of Baltásar Kormakur’s Everest a fictional telling of dramatic real-life mountaineering. The Mount Everest climbing season of 1996 will forever be remembered as one of the most tragic in the annals of mountain climbing. That Spring a record number of expeditions made the fateful attempt to summit the world’s tallest peak: scores would get caught in a freak storm which cost the lives of nine mountaineers. The events have been widely recounted, most notably in Jon Krakauer’s milestone account Into Thin Air and in the IMAX documentary produced by David Breashears (the climber and film maker is also a producer of this film).
The story opens with climbers gathering in Kathmandu, as New Zealader Rob Hall, owner of expedition outfit Adventure Consultants meets his charges (who have paid tens of thousands of dollars for the climb). He indoctrinates the group on the details and the perils of the venture. The group begins the slow climb up the mountain through Sherpa villages and breathtaking vistas (the crew shot in Nepal and subsequently relocated to the Italian Dolomites in Val Senales, as a stand-in location). At the Everest Base Camp, the climbers find themselves in a virtual crowd of fellow adventurers and their guides (and crucial Sherpa guides without whose expert help no climbs would be possible). The acclimating days at camp are a striking representation of the commercial dimension the tallest climb has taken on nowadays and this is a through line of the film (as it was in Krakauer’s book)
The crowds of Everest include guides Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhall), Kiwi climber Guy Cotter (Sam Worthington) and David Breashears (Micah Hauptman). Their clients number an Imax crew, assorted wealthy tourists and news reporters. Hall’s charges are Texan Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), Doug Hansen (John Hawkes) and camp coordinator Helen Wilton (Emily Watson). The film was meticulously researched by Kormákur (The Deep, Two Guns) who studied all preceding books and documentaries. The director also met with survivors and relatives of the victims, notably Jan Arnold, widow of Rob Hall, who died near the summit that tragic day (the film includes the painful satellite phone conversation the couple was able to have as Hall lay trapped by the storm, beyond reach of rescuers). In the film, Arnold is played by
Keira Knightley.
Jon Krakauer has recently been on record stating that making the Everest attempt remains his one major life regret. Even though the experience was the basis for a book, which made his fame and fortune, the author has declared he still suffers from lingering trauma similar to PTSD as a result. As a real-life participant in that ill-fated expedition Krakauer is featured in the film (played by John Kelly). The movie hints at the possibility that his presence as a journalist may have pushed Hall to take greater risks in order to get climbers to the top – the barest hint of controversy in a movie which is otherwise a pretty straightforward recounting of events.
As the festival crowd saw in Venice (the audience included real-life Helen Wilton and Hall’s widow joined by three Sherpas who had never been outside of Nepal – a fitting tribute) it is, in the end, the gripping record of a tragedy that reaffirmed the enormous dangers of the dance with death that is mountain climbing – a contest that still pushes limits of endurance, skill – and human hubris – to its farthest limits. And like Josh Brolin told HFPA journalists: “Everybody wants to touch the extraordinary and they want to be the point 0.0001% that touched God (…) and because of that, nine people died.”
Luca Celada