Free Solo

Did you see “The Alpinist” (2021) with the audacious, and now late, solo climber Marc-André Leclerc? Well in that nerve-wracking feature there is an interview with Alex Honnold, by then an already successful climber for whom fear held no bounds, explaining just how addictive and dangerous this perilous activity is. This film, made three years earlier, reveals to us something of Honnold’s own fearlessness as we watch him set off to scale sheer rock faces like Yosemite’s 3000 foot “El Capitan” armed with little more than a T-shirt, shorts and some especially adapted shoes. He is well aware that the slightest error, or perhaps even just a sudden gust of wind, could leave him squished. Again, like Leclerc, he comes across as quite a selfish man, and you do feel for his girlfriend Sanni McCandless with whom he is frank. As he puts it, he sees no imperative in prolonging his own life at the expense of his career, even for her, and of course she struggles with the worry of him not coming back one day. There are also interviews here with fellow climbers who expertly provide the astonishing video footage that gets us up close and personal with a man who seems to take the pressure and the danger effortlessly in his stride. There is the real question for them, though: if he falls what do they film? Honnold comes across as an engagingly ordinary man, and therein lies part of his charm but also part of what makes his single-minded focus something that must make him an impossible candidate for fatherhood. He is simply too addicted to his climbing, and it seems it’s accompanying solitude too. I don’t usually suffer from acrophobia, but some of his daredevil activities here made the souls of my feet tingle.