Touching the Void by Joe Simpson5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Most movies of this type re-create the action far from the actual scene of the crime, but Macdonald has invented a new subgenre: a docudrama in which the docu and the drama are equally authentic. Employing two actors who are also experienced climbers-Brendan Mackey as Simpson and Nicholas Aaron as Yates-Macdonald and his stripped-down crew (and 80 donkeys) endured twenty-below conditions during the worst snowstorm in ten years. I see it both ways, and clearly so does the director, Kevin Macdonald, who painstakingly reproduced their climb (in the Alps) and thus fits into the heroic-nut category himself. Depending on your point of view, this can either mean superhumanly heroic or just plain bonkers. Simpson and Yates are the type of men usually described as a breed apart. ![]() For winter-locked New Yorkers, the most appropriate movie to see right now is this docu-drama about Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who scaled the near-vertical 20,800-foot west face of the Siula Grande mountain in the Peruvian Andes in 1985. Stepping out into the street after a recent screening of Touching the Void, I was hit by an Arctic blast and my program notes went whooshing down Broadway. The ice man climbeth: Nicholas Aaron (as Simon Yates) tempts fate. ![]()
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