Legendary heart

Some stories are just so amazing that you never get tired of hearing them, and a few—a very few—are actually true. The story recounted in director George Butler’s The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition is one of those.

Englishman Sir Ernest Shackleton was one of the last of the great explorers, and in 1914, when he was 40, Antarctica was one of the last unexplored places on Earth. Shackleton had hoped to be the first to find the South Pole, and he got within 97 miles of it in 1909, but the Norwegian Roald Amundson beat him to the Pole itself in 1911. So Shackleton, never one to be long daunted, conceived another expedition: to become the first man to hike clear across Antarctica.

Shackleton advertised in a newspaper: “Men wanted for harsh journey, small wages, bitter cold. Safe return doubtful.” (The fact that over 5,000 men responded to Shackleton’s ad probably says as much about the difference between his time and ours as anything ever could.) He handpicked a crew of 27, had a ship built and named the Endurance (for his family motto: “By Endurance We Conquer”), and sailed south in August 1914. Less than a day from the Antarctic shore, the temperature dropped suddenly from 20 degrees F to 20 below zero, and Shackleton’s ship was trapped in the ice of the frozen ocean, where it remained for 10 months.

At this point Shackleton’s true greatness as a leader came to the surface. Without a moment’s hesitation he changed the focus of his expedition from trekking across Antarctica to simply getting his men back alive. I’m not giving anything away—it’s all in the historical record—by revealing that, although it took him 20 months, Shackleton succeeded. And he didn’t lose a man.

George Butler’s documentary is based on the book by Caroline Alexander (who, along with Butler, wrote the screenplay and is listed among the film’s 15 producers). Alexander’s book was a bestseller, but Butler is able, in ways that Alexander could never do, to draw on a priceless resource: the records maintained by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s official photographer. It’s one of the astonishing facts of this story that not only was Hurley an excellent photographer and cinematographer (and remember, this was way back before even The Birth of a Nation was made), but—even more incredibly—Hurley was able to lug much of his film back to civilization with him.

Hurley’s footage and images give dimension and immediacy to what might otherwise seem remote and second-hand, like a film about Lewis and Clark or Sir Francis Drake. Shots of the ship crumbling under the relentless pressure of the ice illustrate the dire plight of Shackleton’s crew even more than the tense narration of Liam Neeson. Better still, the personalities and characters of the men shine through in Hurley’s still pictures—for that matter, so do the personalities of the expedition’s sled dogs (all of whom, sadly, had to be sacrificed when food ran low).

Butler combines Hurley’s material with some pretty amazing shots of his own (photographed by Tom Hurwitz and Sandi Sissel), showing the waters and mountainous icebergs of Antarctica as they look today: harsh, deadly, forbidding, yet with a pure crystalline beauty. It’s possible (if not easy) to understand why Shackleton kept returning time and again to this desolate, frozen continent.

Butler also interviews descendants of Shackleton and his men. Although a surprising number of them tell the same story—that their father or uncle or grandfather would never speak of the ordeal during his lifetime—they all provide family contexts for the men, and for the excerpts from their journals that are read on the soundtrack by a succession of expressive voices (even more expressive are the voices of some of the men themselves, preserved in radio interviews conducted in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s).

The Endurance is a first-rate documentary about an exploit that almost defies belief. To call Shackleton’s experience an “adventure” seems to trivialize it somehow, but one thing is certain: Shackleton’s ship, like the film George Butler has made from it, was aptly named.