Everest examined in ‘World’

In theaters

TOP OF THE WORLD, directed by Bill Kern, written by Jon Lonoff and Kern, 70 minutes, unrated. Saturday, 5 p.m. only, Bangor Opera House, Bangor.

Earlier this year, when British climber David Sharp froze to death while climbing Mount Everest, the firestorm of controversy that surrounded his death could have put a thaw on Everest itself.

Now, Bill Kern’s documentary of Everest, “Top of the World,” which was shot 10 years before Sharp’s death, unintentionally offers a measure of insight into what might have led the more than 40 climbers to pass Sharp by as he lay dying while they pressed on toward Everest’s summit.

The film, which is one of two movies the Maine International Film Festival is bringing to the Bangor Opera House tomorrow (Mary Harron’s “I Shot Andy Warhol” shows at 8:30 p.m., with Harron herself on hand to discuss the film), is about Kern’s own journey traveling from his hometown of New York City to the Himalayan Mountains.

Kern was his own one-man crew, shooting video and still photography while embarking on a trek that was as harrowing and as stunning as you expect.

He notes at the start that he came for an adventure, not a vacation. While there’s no question that he got what he wanted – the sketchy bus trip out of Katmandu, for instance, would have been enough adventure for some – the movie also makes the persuasive argument that Kern got more, particularly since so much of his time was spent with the local sherpas.

Moving from teahouse to Buddhist temple, from schoolhouse to souvenir shop, Kern’s gift as a filmmaker is that he understands the power of observation. His movie isn’t driven by intrusion or agenda, but by curiosity and respect. This shows in his interactions with the sherpas, who believe that the mountains in which they live is the home of an enlightened deity, and also with the many climbers he meets along the way who knowingly risk their lives for a chance to reach the top of the world.

It’s here that the movie connects with recent events. Since it comes to us so soon after Sharp’s death, the film takes on a shape Kern never intended. Indeed, while watching the movie, what you take from it isn’t just the startling beauty of the Himalayas or the memories of the people Kern meets along the way. What also comes through is that Everest is a business in which people die.

Kern doesn’t gloss over the point. Toward the end, he notes (and shows) that the trek to the summit is littered with frozen corpses. Their presence is literally the cold reality of the sport, the risk everyone must accept if they’re to go forward. And yet for many of the climbers, nothing will stop them from reaching the top – not the fact that one climber drops from a heart attack due to lack of oxygen, not the very real threat of death that is omnipresent (at 27,000 feet, it’s a bit difficult to breathe and unprotected skin can freeze in an instant), not the idea that they might be leaving behind loved ones should they die.

Do we like these people? In this movie, they’re certainly an amiable sort. But Sharp’s much-publicized death nevertheless forces you to look at each one of them anew.

Grade: B+

On HD DVD

JARHEAD, directed by Sam Mendes, written by William Broyles Jr., 122 minutes, rated R.

Sam Mendes’ “Jarhead,” just out in high definition on HD DVD, takes us back to a past that feels oddly like the present. We’re in the Middle East, Bush is in office, we’re fighting a war few seem to understand. The difference is that the Bush in question is the senior Bush, Saddam Hussein is in power and the war being fought is the Gulf War.

And yet the movie features almost no combat. It’s a psychological drama first, with fiery oil wells, exploding bombs and burned corpses not at the center of the action, but rounding out the periphery to help create the grim mood.

This is a war movie in which the action either is about to happen or already has happened, so it runs counter to many recent big-budget war movies in that it refuses to pepper the proceedings with the sort of bloodshed that plays out nightly on, say, the evening news.

Instead, Mendes recalls elements of Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” in that he draws the movie inward, focusing on the Marines – or the jarheads, as they’re called here – who are sent abroad to fight a vague enemy. What they face instead is a months-long waiting game, with the real fight coming down to fending off boredom and the enemy growing within.

The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Swofford, who “got lost on the way to college” and finds himself at boot camp, where he is eventually shipped to Saudi Arabia. There, he’s recruited by the cigar-chomping Sykes (Jamie Foxx) to become a sniper along with Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), his sketchy partner with the unfavorable past, and a group of other men, the lot of whom have such deep reserves of testosterone, they should be tapped to snuff the current energy crunch.

With no action to be had on the ground, the men find themselves fighting the war unraveling in their heads. What’s happening at home? Are their wives and girlfriends being faithful, or are they cheating on them with other men? Mounting evidence of the latter tears some apart – particularly Swofford, who begins to lose it – just as they’re at last called upon to fight.

But what fight is in this war for them? The Gulf War was fought mostly by air and these men are on foot. It’s the mounting frustration that comes with the dawning realization that their time in the desert may have been for nothing that gives this satisfying, well-acted movie its final blast of irony.

Grade: B

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays in Discovering, Fridays in Happening, and Weekends in Television. He may be reached at Christopher

@weekinrewind.com.