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STEEP
Written & Directed by Mark Obenhaus
Produced by Jordan Kronick & Gabrielle Tenenbaum
Director of Photography, Erich Roland
Edited by Peter R. Livingston, Jr.
Music by Anton Sanko
Released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Narrated by Peter Krause
USA. 90 min. Rated PG
With Ingrid Backstrom, Anselme Baud, Bill Briggs, Doug Coombs, Chris Davenport, Stefano De Benedetti, Shane McConkey, Andrew McLean, Seth Morrison, Eric Pehota & Glen Plake
Special Features: Commentary and Q and A with the director & skiers Ingrid Backstrom & Andrew McLean. “Shooting Steep” featurette. Interview with Doug Coombs. Photo montage

Typical documentary formats come in one of two forms, an argument intended to persuade action on the part of the viewer or a historical narrative. Steep causes a reaction somewhere in the middle. It is an unfocused history of extreme skiing, yet I have rarely felt so compelled into action by a film. As spring finally approaches, I feel a pang of regret watching the skiers of Steep glide down mountains and tempting death, as though I missed what they see get out of the winter months, though the bunny hill has never quite reminded me of my own mortality.

Steep’s strength is its revelation of the beauty of the mountains and the grace of motion that skiing brings to that natural splendor. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t contain much of its own forward motion. It, rather, lingers from one skier to another as it tries to provide a brief history of the birth and development of extreme skiing. The film attempts to be much larger and sweeping than it actually is, partly because the filmmakers underestimate the power of the images to communicate the insatiable pull skiing mountains have for the profiled men and women. The images are never allowed to linger, to show the full intensity and adrenaline-inducing journeys these skiers take.

But the filmmakers don’t go far enough in the other direction, either. There is limited footage of some of the early skiing pioneers, but the interviews that form the meat of the film are never focused enough to draw the audience into a coherent narrative. The interviews never go in-depth, there are so many, and most are given so little time that the film never breaks the surface thematically. Instead, it begins to feel like a who’s who of extreme skiing, which becomes rather tedious.

The film has a lot of beautiful footage and some interviewees are able to articulate the drive and passion of extreme skiers. Despite its failures the film has raised, under its surface, some of the deeper questions that are intrinsic to extreme sports that often go unasked and unanswered. Why do people do this? And not in the old-man-on-the-porch scolding-the-neighbor-kids sort of way, but why have extreme sports come to characterize a generation, and why do continually growing numbers of young people find in these sports their calling? One of the early Italian pioneers of the sport, Stefano De Benedetti, said it well, “You live so close to the possibility of dying you understand what is really important and what [is] not, and this makes you a better person.”

DVD Extras are somewhat sparse. Though there is an abundance of information on how the film was actually shot, most of it is redundant, but the “Shooting Steep” featurette does a good job of showing how the production of this film varied greatly from most ski films in its use of a remote-operated, microwave-powered camera. Dustin L. Nelson
March 18, 2008