Survival film is big Utah draw

In May of 1985,a mountain climber named Joe Simpson spent three days crawling off the face of a 21,000-foot mountain in the Peruvian Andes. Alone, exhausted, dehydrated and dragging a shattered leg, the 25-year-old Englishman survived a plunge into a crevasse the size of the dome in St. Paul's Cathedral, a glacier filled with fissures and cracks, a field of boulders and his own hallucinations as he inched his way back to base camp to rejoin Simon Yates, his climbing mate who, to save his own life, had cut the rope that sent Simpson into the void in the first place.

No one was there to see this ordeal unfold nearly 19 years ago. But through the creative genius of filmmaker Kevin Macdonald, it's almost as if a film crew was on location. In the recently released docudrama "Touching the Void," based on the book of the same title Joe Simpson wrote in 1988, director Macdonald succeeds in making viewers the third member of the Simpson and Yates expedition, right down to feeling Simpson's pain when he and his busted leg keep falling on the aforementioned boulders and Yates' pain — excruciating in its own right — as he tries to cope with the trauma of cutting his friend loose to what he assumed was certain death.

While actors with climbing skills re-create the tragedies and triumphs of 1985, alternating scaling and slipping on nearly vertical peaks of ice, Simpson and Yates — mature men now, with receding hair lines to prove it — narrate their intensely personal tale. And while their presence in the film makes it clear that both are alive and well, the suspense is hardly lessened.

As Ty Burr, a movie reviewer for the Boston Globe, put it, "Macdonald . . . sends you out of the theater checking your limbs for damage."

---

With a $2.7 million budget — about what it cost for makeup in "Lord of the Rings" — and a proportionately small Indie film marketing effort, "Touching the Void" is nonetheless inching its way into moviegoing consciousness. Word of mouth is packing theaters; 120 screens across the country are now showing the British-made film, which opened in late January on just three U.S. screens.

Here in Salt Lake City, the phenomenon is as strong as anywhere. Since quietly opening six weeks ago at the Broadway Centre, "Touching the Void" has outdrawn every other independent film at the Broadway by 250 percent. According to Greg Forston of IFC Films, the movie's distributor, "Touching the Void" had taken in $56,000 at the Broadway box office going into this weekend. And while that's not nearly as much as the $300,000 the movie has generated in ticket sales in Manhattan, "proportionate to market size, Salt Lake is the strongest in the country," says Forston.