This Week's Rent: Is North Face the Best Mountain-Climbing Movie Ever?

Mountain-climbing is, presumably, a balls-out thrill, but for the most part movies about mountain-climbing are dreary. The upward pace is glacial, the perils are predictable, the stakes are, shall we say, not so high. (Nobody starts humping K2 because they have to.) Truly, it's the avocation of freaks, at least in the U.S. In the Alpine countries, it's more of a hairy-chested lifestyle, and so Philipp Stölzl's North Face(2008) has a intimacy with the ordeal that doesn't come off merely as extreme-sport megalomania.

But sure, there's megalomania on hand. The movie is set in 1936 Nazi Germany, and the two real-life climbers we're following, Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) and Andi Hinterstossier (Florian Lukas), are paradigmatic hot-shot alpinists who even quit their Army service to surreptitiously scale the Eiger's virginal north face. Or, "the wall," as it's commonly called in the film.

Saying it's the best mountain-climbing film ever only says so much; you have to go back to the pre-Nazi Leni Riefenstahl "mountain films" of the early '30s to get this kind of veracity with treacherous landscape. That's part of the problem: Mountain-climbing, in movies and reality, is only super-cool if you have reason to believe it's really happening. The more digitals ruin any chance we have of believing in a movie visual, the farther we get from genuine danger. (In those Riefenstahl films, no special effects were needed, not when you are stranded on an ice floe, fall with an avalanche or get chased by a polar bear.) Stölzl's film uses effects, of course -- the Eiger's northern side is no place for a film crew -- but they're judicious, and the film is rough and hairy enough to put you on those icy three-inch-deep-cliffs-overlooking-the-precipice and leave you there.

For the first hour, North Face is pretty perfunctory -- Germanic chest-puffing, exposition, the establishment of the boys' everlasting bond, their triangulated ardor for childhood friend Luise (Joanna Wokalek), who now works for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin. Ignore if you can the film's crude hammering on the Nazi propagandist's amoral opportunism as he urges life-threatening risk and puts the moves on Luise. It's at about the halfway mark, when the climbers take to the Eiger with a competing Austrian team not far behind, that Stölzl's film turns into a trial all its own. The real ordeal, soon enough, becomes how to get down with a near-unconscious body in tow and a blizzard approaching. The worse things get, the more Stölzl cuts to the civilians in tuxes who have cake and champagne. The climbing task is massively futile, of course, especially since we become invested in these up-for-anything lads, and their minute-by-minute plight is as harrowing as it should be, given Stolzl's gripping you-are-there visual approach.

Remembered from Jerichow and Tom Tykwer's The Princess and the Warrior, Furmann may have one of the most hypnotic male faces in the business today (it looks almost 3-D-animated sometimes). Lukas is hard to resist as well with his bouncy energy and sad-Eric-Bana eyes. (Wokalek, stuck in a doughty period coif that makes her almost unrecognizable as the blonde terrorist vixen from The Baader-Meinhof Complex, is game but gets stuck mostly worrying.) But the mountain is the star, and it takes its toll. Once you're off it, Switzerland may not seem like such an idyllic, lovely vacation spot anymore.