Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin's latest spectacularly — maybe too spectacularly — chronicles the Everest dream of ski mountaineer Jim Morrison and his late partner Hilaree Nelson, asking too few questions along the way. Unlike present-day climber Jim Morrison, Mallory didn’t also want to ski down it. But doesn’t the same non-answer apply?
Why are certain people compelled toward any of these reckless, perilous, barely possible feats? If it’s just because they can, should they? These are the questions that will be on the minds of many viewers watching “Everest: The Other Side,” a gleaming, would-be rousing documentary portrait of Morrison, his late partner Hilaree Nelson, and a shared Everest ski-mountaineering dream that wound up taking her life.
But those questions are weakly and only intermittently asked by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the formerly married duo who won an Oscar for the giddy spectacle of “Free Solo,” their 2018 film about the similarly ambitious daredevil rock climber Alex Honnold. But it’s hard to thrill to any of this when our minds are on the woman who died attempting to do the same thing, and the children she left behind. To Morrison, as well as to the filmmakers, this awful backstory makes something cathartic of his accomplishment.
Many in the audience, however, will query the point of it all. Nelson, in fact, was more self-searching than the film around her — which began development as a markedly different story, following the couple’s joint thrill-seeking mission with the same degree of awed excitement that colored “Free Solo’s” portrayal of Honnold. Later, she resumes the subject: “What I can do is love my kids today when I see them.
What else can I do?” Those words haunt proceedings after, around the half-hour mark, Vasarhelyi and Chin reveal her fate: On September 26, 2022, while skiing with Morrison in Nepal, Nelson was caught in a small avalanche, and fell nearly 6,000 feet to her death. It’s a turn of events that the film rather distastefully presents as a twist, having hitherto given no indication to the uninformed that Nelson — seemingly a vibrant, driving subject of the story — is no longer with us. But even if you know what’s coming, it’s a wrench, of the kind that you think might steer “Everest: The Other Side” into more introspective territory.
The filmmakers were close friends of the couple: Surely, one thinks, they must have complex feelings about their role in documenting the primal adrenalin rush of such sports over their self-serving riskiness, just as Morrison, in the wake of the tragedy, may wonder what it was all for. But if these concerns are felt, they’re barely admitted, as the remainder of the documentary celebrates determination over doubt, finding first a spiritual victory in continuing the quest, and a physical one in completing it. The show must go on, even if said show is skiing down the north face of Everest — something that has never been done before, which in the circumstances, wouldn’t strike most people as a good enough reason to do it.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
