Sept. 17--It sounds bizarre, considering "Everest" -- a fairly good, extremely grueling movie as far as it goes -- tracks the true-life fortunes of a battered group of climbers to the highest place on Earth. Yet somehow it doesn't go far enough.
In May 1996, eight climbers died on Mount Everest: three on the north face, under circumstances less known to the outside world, and five others on the south face in a far more extensively documented series of unfortunate events. (They were hardly alone; at least 35 climbers died in 2014 and 2015.) One of the best-known accounts of the 1996 disaster is Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" Krakauer himself, who was writing about the experience for Outside magazine, emerges as a supporting character, played by Michael Kelly.
The script by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy hangs its telling on the peg of expedition leader Rob Hall, a New Zealander portrayed by Jason Clarke in a rare sympathetic role. Hall's company, Adventure Consultants, was among the first expedition outfits to turn Everest into a weirdly crowded destination for extreme-risk and extreme-cost climbers. In the film, one of Hall's eight clients, a Texan in a Dole/Kemp T-shirt named Beck Weathers, played by Josh Brolin, grumbles about the $65,000 price tag.
Along with Weathers, Hall's group includes star journalist Krakauer (Kelly); Seattle mail carrier Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), whose coughing spells indicate serious troubles ahead; and from Japan, Yasuko Namba (Naoko Mori), who's already claimed six of the seven Everest summits and has one more to go. Jake Gyllenhaal takes the role of another climbing company leader, Scott Fischer of Mountain Madness. In one of a series of prologue title cards, we learn that 20 expeditions were attempting to summit the peak in the same two-week window.
The screenplay, as directed by Icelandic native Baltasar Kormakur ("2 Guns," "Contraband"), lays out the perils and the geography efficiently and well. Expedition coordinator Helen Wilton, handled with warm concern by Emily Watson, monitors the increasingly horrific weather from the base camp while Hall and company cope with oxygen deprivation, insufficient hiking ropes and worse. Once above the "death zone," at 26,000 feet, it's pure bodily hell for the climbers even in optimum conditions. But a freak storm enters the scene, and every so often someone reminds us of Everest's indomitable ability to kill.
Shot in Nepal and the Italian Alps, the film does several things right. It doesn't pump itself up with triumphalism when someone makes it to the top. Nor does it treat the deaths of the climbers in baldly melodramatic terms; twice we see characters slip out of frame, down, down, down, but it's bracingly matter-of-fact, scored by composer Dario Marianelli in somber, mournful tones. The acting's consistently solid.
Yet even before the air gets fatally thin, the thinness of the characterizations presents a liability. Screenwriters Nicholson and Beaufoy were after a lean, purposeful procedural, even as they occasionally drop in on the predicaments faced by Hall's pregnant wife (Keira Knightley) and Weathers' spouse (Robin Wright) back home. Director Kormakur is smart not to turn this story into a gorgeous Imax travelogue. But the results feels timid, afraid to express a strong viewpoint or opinion, or contrasting viewpoints, on what went wrong.
There's a much better movie, also dealing with traffic jams on Everest and the whole business of insane-risk tourism, making the festival rounds: Jennifer Peedom's "Sherpa." Vividly, and with a sure sense of intimate human drama, it pays attention to the mountaineers barely acknowledged in movies such as "Everest."
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
mjphillips@tribpub.com
"Everest" -- Two-and-a-half stars
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense peril and disturbing images)
Running time: 2:01
Opens: Thursday evening
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