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The movies are having a mountain-climbing moment. More than a moment, really — it’s been building since 2018, the year that saw the release of not one but two jaw-dropping, vertigo-inducing, heart-in-the-throat documentaries,
“Free Solo”and “The Dawn Wall,” that took you right up to the places that climbers crave and that most of us wouldn’t dare to go near. But as these films demonstrate, we might well dream of it. The new mountaineering movies are delirious vicarious cinema, employing technological means and a filmmaking bravado that comes with them that would have been unimaginable three or four decades ago. Movies like “14 Peaks” and “The Alpinist” — or “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” the great documentary about rooftoppers — chart the impossible, and the very fact that the films exist can seem part of the impossible. That’s an element of their scary exhilaration.
“Tenzing” fits into the genre, though in a far more traditional way. It’s not a documentary. It’s a drama, and a rather old-school one: the story of the first climb to reach the peak of Mount Everest, which happened in 1953. It’s a tale of courage, ambition, arrogance, death, and triumph, and it’s also a story of embattled national pride and ethnic identity. The team that scaled Everest in 1953 was led by the British, who were in the last throes of trying to stake out their empire. No one had ever made it to the top of Mount Everest (there had been eight previous attempts), and this team barely did either. The elements were too forbidding: the chasms and vertical rock faces, the wind and the storms, and the air — so thin it could kill you. The Brits were ready to conquer, but they couldn’t have made the climb without their team of Sherpa, the Tibetan ethnic group native to the area, who had mountaineering in their blood. The Sherpa were officially the “guides,” but they knew what they were doing far more than the British did.
On that revolutionary trek, the first two people to reach the summit of Everest were Edmund Hillary, who was a New Zealander, and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese-Indian Sherpa who’d been dreaming of scaling Everest ever since he was a boy. These two were the Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of mountaineering. But for decades, because of his ethnicity, Tenzing’s role in the mission was understated by history; he was treated as Hillary’s noble assistant. “Tenzing” celebrates his rightful place as a mountaineering visionary — and it does so by dramatizing this climb with a filmmaking rigor that’s stately and inviting and, at moments, ominous and casually miraculous. (When a vast plain of snow suddenly collapses, you feel like a hole just opened up in the earth.) “Tenzing” earns its inspirational fervor, but the reason it fits into the new wave of mountain-climbing movies is that the director, Jennifer Peedom, an Australian who’s been making documentaries about mountain-climbing for 18 years, has staged it with a you-are-there authenticity that’s breathtaking but never showy. She’s a classicist; this is a movie that, in spirit, you could imagine John Huston or Howard Hawks having directed.
The film opens with Tenzing as a boy, gawking at Mount Everest, which looms across the valley like Godzilla. It sits on the border of Nepal and China in the Himalayas, and Tenzing grows up in the shadow of its awe. He calls the mountain by its Tibetan name, Chomolungma, and early on has an encounter with the legendary British alpinist George Mallory (Johnny Flynn), who was part of the first three Everest expeditions in the 1920s. So from the start, the spirit of this endeavor will be global.
Peedom isn’t just a filmmaking wizard. She’s a humanist who dramatizes the intricate politics of the 1953 Everest climb, which was led by John Hunt, a British colonel (played with stiff-upper-lip exuberance by Willem Dafoe) who believes that the entire mission should be run in a strict military manner. He’s right in certain ways, but the trouble is that his outlook prioritizes hierarchy, which places the Sherpa at the bottom of the pecking order.
The film flashes back, maybe a little too much, to key periods of Tenzing’s life (his boyhood, his meeting of the woman he’ll marry). But it’s most interesting when he has to fight and cajole his way onto the expedition. Genden Phunstok, the Tibetan actor who plays Tenzing, is disarmingly handsome, and in his quiet way he’s a star. Dealing with the British, his Tenzing is scrupulous and honorable, but don’t confuse that with subservience. He’s got a will of iron, and a velvet wit, and something else the British don’t have: a faith in the power of Everest that allows him to see the mountain as an ally rather than an adversary. He’s not trying to conquer the mountain; he’s trying to fuse with it. That gives him a whole different outlook as a climber.
As the mission goes on, Tenzing forms a connection with Edmund Hillary, played with frosty empathetic reserve by Tom Hiddleston. The two men have much in common; they are fearless but modest. “Tenzing” captures the sometimes prickly camaraderie of the team members, a drama that feeds into the logistics of the climb, which the movie dramatizes with a stunning existential flair. You literally watch “Tenzing” and think, “How on earth did they film this?” It’s the living definition of an adventure movie, but without adventure-movie corniness. The film never overhypes the danger or the dread, and it cuts no dramatic corners. It knows that the real story is gripping enough.
As the men draw closer to the peak, the likelihood of reaching it actually grows more distant. The weather is too forbidding; the window of time gets smaller. Tenzing is promoted to being an official team member, and when he and Hillary are finally tapped as the two who will make the last leg of the trek, that’s because it’s now clear that they’re the only two who can do it. Even then, their triumph is far from assured; the climb becomes more unreal in its harshness. The pull of “Tenzing” is that we in the audience are right there, along with them, every snowy, icy, impossible step of the way.
