"Touching the Void", book by Joe Simpson, movie dir by Kevin Macdonald

You can't make a movie out of this story, it's a ridiculous idea; watching one guy struggle to drag a broken leg down a Peruvian mountain? THAT'S entertainment. Why not have him give soliloquies along the way? Be sure to fill it with plenty of death-themed musical numbers, like maybe just cut in that last stairway dance number from "Sid and Nancy". (I still hear Chloe Webb shouting "SID!" in my nightmares, by the way.)

Joe Simpson's telling of the Rope Cut Heard 'Round the World is enough to make you vomit with fear and wonder and your own goddamned cowardice. It's like reading about infinite space and your complete insignificance in the massive void, and yet being reminded that your only acceptable response to this circumstances is to not die for as long as you can manage. Your reward at the end of all that struggle? Death.

Simpson quite rudely turned down the chance to die dozens of times during the course of his appallingly lonely journey down a mountain, through a crevasse, up and over the worst scree possible for a man in his condition (hungry, thirsty, wracked with pain, one-legged). His traveling companions should have left their base camp by the time he got there, they should've been unable to hear his cries for help, and yet. And still his journey wasn't over -- returning from the dead is a disturbing thing to do, after all, a bit of an imposition on even your closest friends. He still had to be bounced back to civilization on the back of a mule, ignored in a Peruvian hospital, and assured by his home doctors that he'd never again walk correctly. Somehow, he survived, did not go crazy, and did walk and climb again.

So he got to tell his own story, again, in the movie. Macdonald solved the dilemma of how to film this movie by hiring actors to recreate the action and having Simpson and Simon Yates narrate their story in intercut interviews. The result is spellbinding and sad and awful and even funny in the "cosmic joke" sense. It reminded me of "King Lear"; the gods "kill us for their sport".

I was astonished by this movie. I read the book afterwards and was shaken up by Simpson's story in ways I still haven't resolved.

And then there's this: watch the making of feature on the DVD. I think artists, especially movie directors, have to have a streak of terrible cruelty in them in order to do great work. Watch as Macdonald drags Simpson and Yates back to the scene of this awful tragedy, which became not a tragedy, sort of, but somehow an even worse one because of the painfully unresolved feelings of guilt and betrayal and blame and fear and, over it all, loneliness of a type we mostly can't admit to ourselves. Watch as he takes Simpson to the places of his worst nightmares, dresses him in facsimilies of his own former climbing clothes, and makes him reenact dragging himself down the mountain to use in long shots in the movie. And then comes the best part -- he makes him do it AGAIN. And AGAIN, despite the fact that Simpson's face registers pure horror. Whatever it takes to make the movie, right, Macdonald? Right. Watch Simpson and Yates' faces as they see this place again and try to talk casually about it. Watch as they confront boogeymen they'd buried under the bed long ago. Do you feel dirty yet?

Watch as Lear cradles the body of Cordelia.