The new mountain-climbing documentary Meru is not only an irresistible adrenaline rush of a movie (opening Friday at Bay Area theatres), but for serious film buffs a very tangible lesson in the exhilarating development of a new hybrid category of film that fits comfortably in neither the old fiction nor documentary slots.
"Wow!" The first bit of language off the screen prepares you for total immersion into the daredevil world of young climbers. The filmmakers subtly collapse and expand time as they unroll the story of a hardy band of climber brothers determined to conquer one of the world's last remaining unreachable summits, the so-called "Shark's Fin" on India's Mount Meru, rising 21,000 feet above the River Ganges, sacred to Hindus.
Warning: this journey, compressed into 90 minutes of screen time, covers two separate expeditions and a couple of life cycles touching several families, producing at least one fatality and one fresh widow, as well as a climber dad who overcomes survivor's guilt to help raise his late buddy's kids. In some ways, this little doc contains many of the heart-stopping beats of such acclaimed fiction-film fare as Ordinary People, The Great Santini and Titanic. For viewers like me, for whom climbing up on a kitchen ladder can induce waves of fear and vertigo, Meru is a guilty pleasure, unlocking a top-of-the-world kingdom whose denizens brave avalanches, sub-zero temperatures, and grotesque if temporary injuries to toes and fingers.
Knowing they needed an audience guide, co-directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi recruited legendary outdoor adventure author Jon Krakauer. Krakauer is best known for his 2007 nonfiction bestseller Into the Wild, the basis for Sean Penn's account of one young man's fatal encounter with a tragically remote slice of the Alaskan wilderness. Krakauer vividly describes the bond among Meru 's alpining trio: Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk.
"Conrad first tried Meru in 2003, and got his ass kicked. It was super-technical climbing. This isn't Everest, it's a whole different kind of climbing. On Everest, you can hire Sherpas to bring all your stuff, to fix the ropes for you, to take all kinds of risks. Jimmy and Conrad have climbed Everest four or five times, Jimmy's even skied off it. But Meru's the anti-Everest. No one's going to carry your stuff: if you need it, you need to carry it on your back."
A chilling moment occurs as co-director Jimmy Chin relives his close-call encounter with a mountain avalanche, an episode that ended with his head miraculously popping up out of the snow.
Fans of the Winter Olympics may notice an ironic convergence between the dangers and rewards facing the men scaling Meru and similar dangers confronting Olympic-caliber snowboarders like the medal-winning, charismatic redhead Shaun White and his one-time rival Kevin Pearce. At the height of his duel in the snow with White, Pearce suffered a near-fatal crash that resulted in traumatic brain injuries, as depicted in the 2012 doc Crash Reel, similar to ones suffered by one of Meru 's climbers, cinematographer Renan Ozturk.
All of this thrilling footage illustrates not only how Meru copped the U.S. Audience Documentary Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, but also why this terrific movie is best viewed on a 45-foot screen. Ozturk's miraculous recovery takes on beyond-heroic resonance when he insists on accompanying his buddies for a second challenge to the mountain that nearly did him in. As Krakauer notes, "Meru is not just hard, it's hard in this really complicated way: you can't just be a good ice-climber, you can't just be good at altitude, you can't just be a good rock-climber. You've got to be able to ice-climb at 20,000 feet. That feat, to a certain kind of mindset, [presents] an irresistible appeal."
Here's a resounding "Wow!" for Meru .