Free Solo (2018)

Free Solo documents a man climbing a rock without a rope. Alex Honnold, a shy introvert who lives in a van, spends the film preparing to scale the 3,000 foot Freerider route on El Capitan, and the camera crew spends the film worrying that they will watch him die. It is a documentary about granite, grip strength, and a brain that registers almost nothing in the amygdala when shown images of disaster. There is no thesis here. No audience is being instructed. The rock does not care about our politics, and neither, apparently, does the film.

The supporting cast is small. Sanni McCandless appears as Honnold's girlfriend, feeding rope and fretting, and Dierdre Wolownick appears as his mother. Both are women, and both are present because they are in his life. The film does not organize them into an argument. Honnold's MRI scan is offered as a curiosity about fear, not as a statement about neurology, and his van-dwelling solitude is a lifestyle choice, not a manifesto. Tommy Caldwell climbs alongside him and says little of consequence. Yosemite is photographed for its beauty and its danger, never as a cause.

This is, by the standards of the current moment, an unusually quiet piece of work. It has a subject and it attends to that subject. The directors, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, resist the urge to widen the frame into commentary, and the result won an Academy Award largely on the strength of suspense and a man hanging from a crack by two fingers. We are left with a rare artifact: a film that asks nothing of us but attention, and gets it. A zero across the board, and a pleasant evening at the cinema. The sommelier notes oak, chalk, and vertigo, with no sermon on the finish.

A note for the ledger: no progressive programming is detectable in this vintage. The film concerns itself with a person, a wall, and the space between them. That is all it concerns itself with, and that is enough. We file it under adventure, and we move on to the next bottle.

Thematic classification: a documentary that won Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards, and one that tells a true story of a real climb by a real man on a real rock. No franchise, no source novel, no cape, no remake, and no number one at the domestic box office. A rare thing, and a simple one, and we should not expect to see its like again soon.