Free Solo was the only Oscar-nominated documentary I hadn’t seen at the time of the Academy Awards ceremony, and of course it was the winner for Best Documentary Feature, but it’s free to stream on Hulu now and certainly worth a watch … although I wonder if I got a very different message from it than many other people did. I don’t think this guy is a hero at all, nor is it really a portrait of a great achievement. Free Solo presents us with a sort of modern Don Quixote whose quest is inexplicable and maybe pointless, and who pursues the goal in this film with disregard for his own life and for the wishes of the person who is, or should be, the most important to him.
Alex Honnold is a free solo climber, which means he climbs giant, sheer rock faces without ropes or other safety gear. This is, as you might imagine, really fucking dangerous; at one point in this documentary we see brief video or photo montages of other famous free soloists who fell to their deaths. In Free Solo, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin follow Honnold as he prepares to scale El Capitan, known as El Cap, a 3000-foot wall in Yosemite National Park in California, which nobody had free-soloed before. We know that he survived – had he died, the film might not exist, and his death would have made the news – although the way the documentarians filmed the ascent is itself noteworthy, and many of the drone shots, near and far, of El Cap are utterly breathtaking. There’s a scene at the end that gives you a sense of how small a human is in comparison to the rock itself, and I think it challenges our ability to understand the scale of the world around us.
Free Solo aims to be about much more than strictly the ascent, and it partially succeeds. Honnold is a different cat, to put it gently. He reveals things about his childhood that may explain his strange affect, and undergoes an fMRI at one point that tells him and us that his amygdala is not very sensitive to excitement, which likely contributes to his thrill-seeking behavior as well. He and his mother have extremely different stories of what his father, who died when Honnold was 19, was like. Honnold has lived in a van for years and keeps a rather ascetic existence, with bizarre habits that would seem to go along with just a peculiar choice of living arrangements. There’s a scene where he cooks some strange assemblage of vegetables and beans and then eats it with a giant, flat cooking spatula, as if no one ever showed him how to use utensils.
Early in the film, a new character appears, Sanni, who attended a book-signing of Honnold’s, slipped him her number, and has since become his girlfriend. (Nobody has ever slipped me a number at a book signing, so clearly climbing giant rocks > baseball stats.) She clearly loves him, although there’s never the sense that this is some sort of hero-worship, and she is actively working both to get him to participate in a normal, adult, romantic relationship, and to consider that chasing death with these free solo climbs now affects her life too. He’s strangely detached in most of his interactions with her – there’s one exception at the end of the movie when we see him react to her in new ways, like the egg cracked and he’s coming out of his shell – and comes off as unaware of her emotions much of the time. It does not help matters that Sanni is both very upbeat and very pretty, which I think had to bias me in her favor and likely will have the same effect on many viewers. She’s just – here’s that word – likeable, which makes Honnold look like Lukas Haas playing a character with Asperger’s by comparison.
Sanni’s arrival in the film was a necessary bit of luck, as she gives us the best window on to Honnold’s personality and pushes him at least a little to explain his motivation for continuing to climb increasingly dangerous cliffs. (It’s not mentioned in the film, but Honnold described himself in a 2011 interview as a “militant atheist,” and I can not imagine having the strong belief that there is nothing after death and then pursuing a career that is likely to lead to an early decease.) I don’t think Free Solo explains enough why Honnold does what he does; he comes off like a modern George Mallory, who answered the question of why he wanted to climb Mount Everest with the possibly apocryphal answer “Because it’s there.” We get something from that fMRI result, and more from his interactions with Sanni, but he’s still something of an enigma even at the end of it all, especially since there’s no good reason he has to climb without some sort of protection. When you watch him ascend, it is absolutely impressive and Vasarhelyi and Chin do a superb job of capturing his climb, but how he could do this when there’s someone on the ground who’s waiting to hear he survived and would be devastated if he didn’t, is completely beyond me.
, a self-published memoir from Mark Lijek, one of the six embassy employees rescued by the CIA; and 
, co-authored by Tony Mendez himself.
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won widespread accolades, including eight Oscar nominations, for its portrayal of an alternate ending to World War II that involves Jews killing Nazis while working in enough allusions to other movies to fill a film studies major’s thesis. As someone insufficiently schooled in the genres Tarantino reveres, however, I didn’t get the full value of the work and found the movie, judged mainly on plot and character, a little less than fulfilling.