Explorer

“The world’s greatest explorer” is himself explored in Matthew Dyas’ shambolic documentary.

Fortuitously two directly comparable biopics have reached us simultaneously: one of them is good and the other is poor. The poor one is Explorer which has been put together with none of the expertise that has gone into McEnroe. The potential for both pieces was equal since each had a fascinating man as its subject. In the case of Explorer, it is Ranulph Fiennes, famed for his polar expeditions, for mountaineering and for his Transglobe undertaking which culminated in 1982. Just as in the case of John McEnroe, substantial archive footage is available of Fiennes and in each case the man himself was ready to be seen in the present day looking back on his eventful life. In the case of Fiennes that means that we encounter a man in his late seventies who has often struggled financially and who has never been entirely at ease with being Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes to give him his full name. Had he been honoured for an achievement he would have felt differently about it, but his was an inherited title.

One aspect in which the two men differ is that John McEnroe, the brilliant but notorious bad boy of tennis, reveals himself as somebody who readily criticises his younger self and is keen to consider the factors that shaped his character. Fiennes, in contrast, is mainly interested in what he did for its own sake rather than wanting to look deeper into himself. Explorer does, however, reveal how he came to grow up in a female household (his siblings were all sisters and his father died in the war four months before he was born in 1944). Seen as a pretty boy at Eton and bullied in consequence, Ran (as he likes to be called) immediately took up boxing to assert his masculinity and his adventurous endeavours as an adult seem to have been driven by a desire to prove himself worthy of the father he never knew, a highly-regarded military man.

These facts may point to what made Ranulph Fiennes the man he is, somebody admired hugely by Prince Charles who sees him as a true Englishman whose determination and bravery render him wonderfully eccentric and mad. Nevertheless, McEnroe is far more revealing of its subject than Explorer is and that is so even if this film does find Fiennes eager to emphasise how much he owes to his first wife, Ginny, who died of cancer in 2004. The extent to which he stresses this is notable and admirable, but one does feel that the filmmaker, Matthew Dyas, should have told us more about the second wife, Louise Mallington. We glimpse her and their daughter Elizabeth but this aspect is skimped.

However, when it comes down to it, the significant difference between these two films lies in the way in which each has been assembled. Both works favour voice-overs used against archive footage but Dyas is much less adept than McEnroe’s Barney Douglas in finding visuals that blend comfortably with what we are hearing. Explorer features a large number of comments from friends and colleagues but, being reduced mainly to voice-over and to a mere sentence or two, they make little impact. The very occasional use of a narrator also feels ill-judged. But worse still is the way in which the narrative unfolds.

The film starts with a preface that seems quite lengthy and which suggests nothing so much as a ragbag of odds and ends which might have been sent to an editor to see if something could be made of them. For the completed work actually to start in this way is prophetic of what is to come. The archive material that is used often comes up in no logical order. Thus we travel with Fiennes on his 1981 attempt to reach the North Pole before we learn about his childhood including his days in school and that material when it does come arrives not before but after a discussion of his time in the military in the 1960s. Furthermore, recent footage shot for the film, including appearances by an old family friend, Anton Bowring, is clumsily inserted at intervals. When it comes to the old footage Dyas more than once seeks extra period resonance by adding snatches of rock 'n' roll pop songs - not, I think, a good idea. The North Pole and Prince Charles recur at intervals and the Transglobal journey undertaken by Fiennes is mentioned more than once as is his celebrated story of how after suffering from frostbite he chose not to wait for surgery but to cut off the tips of four of his fingers himself.

Shots of Fiennes in the Welsh mountains in 2020 suggest a life apart but are followed by talk of his recovery from a massive heart attack back in 2003 before we are led to the one topic that makes Fiennes emotional, the death of Ginny. After that we find him attempting to climb Everest and learn also of much more recent health problems.  Only after that are the solitary images of 2020 challenged by a first mention of his second wife, Louise, whom he married in 2005. Just two brief comments are included which question whether or not there is a competitiveness in Fiennes which is less than admirable, but the real trouble with Explorer is that, despite the interest inherent in the material, the bits and pieces have been assembled in such a messy way. Admirers of Fiennes will doubtless welcome the film regardless, but it should have been a much better film and easily could have been.

MANSEL STIMPSON

Featuring  Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Anton Bowring.

Dir Matthew Dyas, Pro George Chignell, Ph Chris Openshaw, Ed Charlie Hawryliw and Ben Stark, Music Rebekka Karijord.

Good Productions/Universal Pictures Content Group/BFI-Piece of Magic Entertainment/Universal Pictures Content Group.
113 mins. UK. 2022. UK Rel: 14 July 2022. Cert. 12A.