Race to the Bottom of the Earth (***)

Nancy Glass, who directed this documentary along with Michele Loschiavo, says she almost laughed when Todd Carmichael told her he was an explorer. It sounded so out of the past. What’s left to explore? That strikes me as the fundamental difference between someone like Roald Amundsen, whose team first reached the South Pole in 1991, and Carmichael, who headed there alone in 2008. That is, while the early explorers were no doubt driven by the will to test themselves, there was also the drive to go where no one had before, to discover. For Carmichael, along with a Finnish man named Teemu, there is only the first thing. They are something closer to ultramarathoners. “We’re out of our heads,” Carmichael says to the camera. It is another gift of the modern age that he can film himself and make phone calls.

Other modern things, like outside assistance and motorized transport, he eschews. The goal was to travel unaided, alone—Teemu traveled separately—the 700 miles from the edge of Antarctica to the pole in record time, just under 40 days. That is, to average more than 17 miles per day on foot, dragging a sled with 250 pounds worth of food and equipment, in subzero weather, through ice and snow. I’d heard Carmichael being interviewed on radio some months ago, talking about frostbite, and eating thousands of calories of butter, and having his ski break the first day, but the video shows what it was like.

Glass and Loschiavo have done a good job editing 70 hours of footage into a nicely paced narrative, mostly Carmichael and Teemu talking to the camera, but also of Carmichael’s wife back in Philadelphia. Most of the footage is inside a tent, but Carmichael does film himself trudging forward. The only flaw might be the inability of film to truly capture the most amazing thing about the journey. That is, the camera readily makes one appreciate a world-class sprinter, a warrior in battle, or even a poker player. But the camera could not make me comprehend what would make someone endure frostbite-inducing cold, lack of sleep, and sore muscles, and yet maintain the will to push on (and pull on a heavy sled) hour after hour, day after day, just to say you did it.

IMDB link

viewed 11/2/11 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 11/2/11