Tenzing: The Man Who Was Always on the Mountain

Ask most people who first climbed Mount Everest and they will say Edmund Hillary. Some will add "and a Sherpa." Fewer can name him. That gap, between the New Zealander who was knighted and the Nepali-Indian man who was, for decades, a footnote in his own achievement, is the subject of Jennifer Peedom's Tenzing, and it is the reason the film matters more than its conventional biopic shape would suggest.

The question the film keeps circling is one that extends well past the Himalayas: why is it always so easy to dismiss the talent and contribution of people of color? The 1953 expedition was a British project, led by Colonel John Hunt (Willem Dafoe), staffed by British and Commonwealth climbers, and celebrated as a coronation gift to a new queen. But the mountain the British called Everest was Chomolungma to the people who lived beneath it, and the man who reached its summit alongside Hillary (Tom Hiddleston) had already been on it six times before the British got there. Tenzing Norgay had climbed higher than any human alive the previous year, with a Swiss team, and come within a few hundred meters of the top. The 1953 expedition did not discover him. It hired him.

Peedom comes to this material as a documentarian, and her 2015 film Sherpa remains the sharpest account of what the Everest industry costs the people who make it possible. That film watched Sherpas carry the loads, fix the ropes, and die in the Khumbu Icefall while Western clients waited at base camp for their summit window. Tenzing, her first narrative feature, written by Luke Davies with oversight from Norgay's son Tenzing Norbu, takes that same moral clarity back to the origin of the story.

The film is unsparing about the arithmetic of early Himalayan mountaineering. British expeditions arrived with imperial confidence, oxygen tanks, and a habit of treating local men as equipment. The 1920s sequences, in which a young Tenzing encounters George Mallory's expedition, quietly establish that Sherpas were dying on this mountain a full generation before any Westerner reached the top; Mallory's 1922 attempt ended with seven of them buried in an avalanche. Their names do not appear on the memorials that made Mallory a legend. Peedom lets that silence sit.

What the film understands is that white ambition on Everest was never self-sufficient. It ran on Sherpa lungs, Sherpa knowledge of the weather and the snow, Sherpa willingness to go back up when the clients could not. The adventure that Western culture has mythologized for seventy years was, in practical terms, a service the Sherpas provided. Without their strength and their wisdom about a mountain they regarded as a goddess rather than a trophy, there is no story. There is a group of Englishmen at base camp.

The film's structural choice, telling Tenzing's life nonlinearly across three ages (Samdrup Dorje Lama as a child, Tenzin Dalha as a young man, Genden Phuntsok in his prime), does the political work before the plot does. By the time the British expedition arrives, we have spent an hour with Tenzing's calling, his failures, his family, his relationship to the mountain. The expedition is not the story. It is the last chapter of a story that began without any white man in it.

Phuntsok, in his English-language debut, carries this with remarkable ease. The famous smile is there, but what he plays underneath it is a man who has spent his whole life being useful to people who do not see him, and who has decided that the summit is the one thing he will not be talked out of. His Tenzing is not a sidekick who gets promoted. He is the protagonist who has been waiting for the camera to turn around.

Hiddleston's Hillary is generous work in a role that could have been either a villain or a savior. The film lets him be neither. He is a decent man who forms a genuine partnership with Tenzing on the mountain, and who benefits, without asking to, from a world that will hand him the credit. Dafoe's Hunt gets the film's most pointed scene: the decision to list Tenzing as a full climbing member of the team rather than as hired help. It is presented as progressive, and for 1953 it was. It is also a reminder that Tenzing's standing depended on a white man agreeing to grant it.

The most quietly devastating thread is the aftermath. The film touches the controversy that followed the summit, the pressure on both men to say who stepped onto the top first, the way the question itself revealed what the world wanted: a white hero and a native assistant, in that order. Tenzing's refusal to play that game, and Hillary's decision to stand with him on it, is the closest the film comes to an explicit thesis about erasure. It could have pushed harder. Norgay spent the rest of his life fielding that question, and the knighthood that went to Hillary went to him as a lesser medal.

Tenzing is a handsomely made, emotionally direct film that never quite escapes the sturdy-biopic template. It is more interested in reverence than in anger, and viewers hoping for the documentary edge of Sherpa will find it softened for a wide audience. The landscapes, shot on location, are extraordinary; the score by Rebekka Karijord occasionally tells you what to feel before the images have earned it.

But the template is also the point. For seventy years, this genre has existed to canonize men like Hillary and Mallory. Peedom has borrowed the form and handed it to the man who was left out. That is not a small act. It is an acknowledgment, overdue by generations, that the wisdom and strength that got humans to the top of the world belonged first to the people who lived beneath it. The adventure was always theirs. The credit is only now catching up.

Tenzing opens in U.S. theaters October 9 and streams on Apple TV beginning October 16.