Peak ambition

Portrait of Mount Everest climbers shows who real heroes are

Scenes of Everest’s treacherous slopes were shot in Nepal and New Zealand.

MOVIE REVIEW

TENZING Starring: Genden Phuntsok, Tom Hiddleston Alpine TV 128 minutes

Stately and occasionally stirring, Jennifer Peedom’s Tenzing has an old-fashioned earnestness that’s gently disarming.

The film’s real-life subject is Tenzing Norgay (Genden Phuntsok), the Nepali-Indian mountaineer who, alongside Sir Edmund Hillary (Tom Hiddleston), became the first person reported to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953.

Neither a straight-up biopic nor a flat-out adventure yarn (its tone is too buttoned-up and British for that), Tenzing is instead a dramatic portrait of one man’s intense, all-consuming longing.

As a child in 1924 on the Tibetan Plateau, Tenzing watches, rapt, as the men from away places prepare to climb the mountain he knows only by its Tibetan name, Chomolungma.

One of those men is English mountaineer George Mallory (Johnny Flynn), who would die on that ascent and whose brief exchange with Tenzing ignites a dream that swiftly becomes an obsession.

Almost three decades later, that drive will secure Tenzing, now an experienced climber, a spot as head Sherpa on Hillary’s expedition. This places him in an awkward limbo: neither a member of the British climbing team nor an ethnic Sherpa, he is viewed as an outsider by both groups. His intelligence and preternatural climbing ability win him a promotion and respect, but Tenzing remains keenly aware of the expedition’s class boundaries and not-so-subtle racism.

Shot in Nepal and New Zealand, Tenzing brings a chilly majesty to Everest’s treacherous slopes, with Stefan Duscio’s camera confirming Tenzing’s belief in the mountain’s mystical power.

But a screenplay (by Luke Davies) that over-relies on confusing flashbacks and insists too often on Tenzing’s spiritual connection to Everest can cause other characters to fade to near-irrelevance. (Hillary, a polite New Zealander, is so reserved I forgot at times he was even there.) Harder to overlook is Willem Dafoe’s Colonel Hunt, the expedition leader and a man who clearly bathes in starch.

Whatever your feelings about Everest’s current ruination, there is no doubt that Tenzing — who, with Hillary, pioneered the mountain’s popular Southeast Ridge route, the site of an infamous 2014 disaster — deserves the spotlight. And if its somewhat sentimental but colorful film is a little too saintly, Phuntsok’s performance is so modest and joyful that it’s difficult to mind. Whether trudging through a monsoon or hauling a grateful Hillary out of a nasty crevasse, this is a man who’s living his best life.

In any event, the film’s more workmanful tendencies are easily mitigated by its classical beauty and what can only be called its dignified — and occasionally breathtaking — handling of danger.

Tenzing may be on a spiritual quest, but the Sherpas harbor no illusions about their position or their military-style overlords. Savvy and tart-tongued, they understand perfectly that their skills and discomfort are serving inflated foreign egos, men who “get to spend the year here.”

Tenzing, in its quietly empathetic way, makes sure we know who the real heroes are.

— New York Times