Meru (2015) – is this the best mountain movie so far?

Meru, the near-mythic mountain in the Garhwal Himalaya, offers 1400m of steep ice and overhanging granite. But in the film, it’s the human beings that matter. [1300 words 5 mins

Meru, the sacred mountain at the head of the Ganges, marks the centre of the World (or indeed the Universe) in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain mythology. Its four faces are made of different minerals: gold, crystal, lapis lazuli and ruby. “The Sun and the Moon revolve around Mount Meru,” and when the sun goes behind the mountain, that’s what makes it night-time.

It’s not clear whether the sacred mountain is named after the 6660m Meru Peak in the Indian end of the Himalayas, or the other way around¹. Because, the mountain of the so-called real world is every bit as mythic. It’s a pointy place of steep ice, fluted near-vertical snow, and Yosemite-style granite walls, among surroundings of ice-peaks stretching to the horizon. The spectacular Shark’s Fin route to its central summit had turned back more than 20 attempts, and was still in 2011 unclimbed.

The documentary film about it is by Jimmie Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. They’re the  team that went on to make the Oscar-winning ‘Free Solo’, about Alex Honnold climbing El Capitan alone and unroped². ‘Meru’ is a sort of prequel, about one of Jimmie Chin’s own climbs.

 Alex Honnold’s seven years of preparation and four hours of solo climbing above the high pines of Yosemite: that is an outstanding climb, and the ‘Free Solo’ film is also a great character study. But El Capitan is just a rockface, with a routeline studied up in advance, fixed protection points for bailing out, and grassland plants growing out of the top. Meru is a proper mountain with a summit where you sit with one leg dangling down the 1200m southeast face and the other dangling down the slightly lower northeast face, while you wonder how long you can safely stick around enjoying the moment before getting stuck into your three-day descent.

The film’s cinematography is basic; and perhaps all the better for that. There were no reconstructions: the mountain sequences are all shot on the mountain. There are no ground-based cameras, no prelaid ones in place on the iceface. Hand-held means holding your breath while shooting; and at 6000m, that makes for very short takes.  And no re-takes, no special posing: the camera always in second place to the climbing.

Jimmie Chin climbing on Meru: photo Renan Ozturk

Conrad Anker is mostly known as the man who found George Mallory’s dead body on Everest – and Jimmie Chin was the cameraman on the associated film, ‘The Wildest Dream’³. But Anker is much more than that, with far more interesting ascents behind him than the tourist routes on Everest.

One of the things the film explores is Anker’s three relationships with successive climbing partners. His mentor Mugs Stump died while guiding a climb on Denali in Alaska — in a plot twist that’s almost too neat, Anker’s mentor Mugs had himself failed on this Meru climb, twice. Then, his climbing partner Alex Lowe, killed by an avalanche on Shishapangma; and his mentee and now partner Jimmy. The two of them pick up a younger joint mentee Renan Ozturk, who is another top mountain cameraman, allowing Jimmy himself to take part in the story.

The knowledgeable commentary is from climber and journalist Jon Krakauer:⁴

The rewards of climbing are huge. The problem is, you don’t always come out of it okay. [Shot of badly injured Renan Ozturk, eyes closed, in helicopter.] Sometimes you die. And then, you can’t justify it.

Legacy footage: (presumably Conrad Anker climbing with Alex Lowe)

And so, while Anker is living with the loss of two of his partners in climbing, each of the other two is also traumatised. If I was being trite, I’d even say ‘traumatised in three very different ways’, like the popular novels that always feature three ‘very different’ women. Renan is in recovery from the horrific ski-ing accident that had him strapped to that stretcher in the helicopter; Jimmie has just survived, intact, an enormous avalanche that spat him out at the bottom end a bit like Jonah and the Whale. “I often wondered how I was going to die. Now I know.”

And the way they work through and move on from their personal damage? That comes from the therapeutic effect of dangling in a small plastic bag (a ‘portaledge’) above 500m of ice and empty air, as the storm batters the nylon and the avalanches roar past on either side. And the thing that’s so strange is that I’m not being ironic here. Unrecognised by the therapeutic community, this turns out to be, indeed, a valid route through: mountaineering the cause of personal damage, but also the cure.

In this National Geographic clip on portaledge living, Jimmie and Conrad show you around their high-level home (film by Renan Ozturk).

The film includes the climbers’ wives and life-partners, explaining how they deal with being lied to by their blokes about how they aren’t going to be doing any more dangerous climbing now they’ve got a young family to look after. There’s also legacy footage of Anker’s two lost partners, Mugs Stump and Alex Lowe.

But it’s a different partnership that’s the making of this film. In the course of shooting Meru (it took three years) Jimmy the mountain cameraman got together with film editor Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi — they’re now married to each other. And she’s the one who has raised this climbing movie into what is, in effect, a non-fiction novel. By the time the climbers are above the five days of tricky mixed rock and ice, confronting the ‘big wall climb’ that forms the top 600m of the mountain, we already know the mountain itself, but also the three main characters.

Jimmie Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

What my non-climbing wife Clare liked about ‘Meru’ was that it wasn’t even all that frightening. The climbers are roped, and belayed, and the belay point is also the camera point, making it all look rather safer than it actually is – for the film’s viewers, the ski-ing sequence is the only truly terrifying part. But also, the way the film conveys the climbers’ emotional lives on the way up. This is not done with voice-over commentary: “That it is not so much a look at wild nature, as it is an insight into ourselves, our nature,” intoned in a quirky Bavarian accent – that works, it certainly does, but only if you’re Werner Herzog. And not with tearful, confessional recently-bereaved-climber-to-camera. The climbers express themselves (other than with their iceaxes) in throwaway remarks, jokes and occasional expletives.

So yes, there’s superb camera work here: intimate portaledge moments alternating with sweeping night skies and huge vertical sweeps of ice and granite. That bit’s Jimmie Chin. But it’s the partner you don’t see,­ Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi  with her un-mountaineering eye, her digital scissors-and-sellotape – that makes this into the best mountain movie I’ve seen so far.

And if you still don’t believe me — here, just take a look at the trailer.

Below the buttons, the interactive bit: my list of the five best mountain movies, plus the two worst ones: please set me straight via the comments box!

The five best mountain movies

4 Dark Glow of the Mountains (Werner Herzog, 1984) – short documentary on Reinhold Messner and Hans Kammerlander attempting an alpine style traverse of Gasherbrum I and II.

3 Touching the Void (Kevin Macdonald, 2003) – documentary re-enacting Joe Simpson’s escape after breaking his leg on Siula Grande, Andes. Almost as good as the book itself.

2 Free Solo (Jimmie Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi , 2018) – Alex Honnold’s free solo ascent of Sidewinder on El Capitan, Yosemite

1 Meru (Jimmie Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, 2015)

?? The Dawn Wall (2017) reviewers seem to think this one matches up to the four above: free-climbing (but not solo) again on El Capitan.

A couple of duds, mainly because of their laughable plot lines

The Eiger Sanction (Clint Eastwood 1975)

Scream of Stone (Werner Herzog 1991)

1. Meru is also the third summit of Kilimanjaro, leading to perplexing Google prompts like ‘Is Meru harder than Kilimanjaro’ (no) interleaved with ‘Is Meru harder than Everest’ (yes). The Sanskrit ‘Meru’ simply means high place or peak. So that Mount Meru joins Pen y Fan in Wales and Brae Fell in the northern Lake District among hills whose name just means ‘hill’, along with Bredon Hill, Djebel Amour in Algeria, and five hills in the US called Summit Peak.

2. My ‘Mountain Literature Classic’ article on ‘Free Solo’ is here on UKclimbing.com . (And yes, film is the dominant literary form of our age, so that a feature film can indeed count as a literary classic.)

3. The Wildest Dream’ (Anthony Geffen 2010) has voiceover by Liam Neeson, a portentous music track, and footage of Mallory’s windblasted corpse which some may find distasteful. As well as great Jimmie Chin camerawork and footage of Anker climbing the Second Step without the Chinese ladder. If my ambivalent review tempts you, it’s viewable in full at  https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8i7.gsf .

4. The author of ‘Into Thin Air’, the account of the multiple Everest disaster of 1997, and ‘Into the Wild’, about Christopher McCandless the wilderness mystic who starved to death in Alaska.