Explorer: warm, wryly absurdist portrait of a very British throwback

What makes Ran run? Sir Ranulph Fiennes, né Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd Baronet, may not use his inherited title; in Matthew Dyas’s new documentary, Explorer, we’re told Fiennes quietly crosses it out when he sees it. But he remains a very British throwback, evoking both familiar character tropes – the dryly reticent but caper-prone aristo with a stiff upper lip and a restless gleam in his eyes – and the archetype of the British conqueror, forever leaving his Union Jacks in the unlikeliest of spots, from poles to mountains to lost cities. In a film full of friends’ testimonies, one of the most telling comes in an archive clip of Fiennes’s patron and admirer Prince Charles, who praises Fiennes as “one of life’s great eccentrics”, his plan to circumnavigate the surface of the globe via both poles (accomplished 1979-’82) “gloriously and refreshingly mad”.

Fiennes claims to have auditioned for James Bond – Roger Moore apparently ended up besting the man with a “face like a farmer” – and his story is indeed akin to that of a parallel Bond who was rebuffed from the secret service after a period fighting Islamist rebels in Oman, going on to pursue the globe-trotting path of Phileas Fogg with the help and encouragement of his childhood sweetheart.

Be all this the stuff of boys’-own adventure stories or imperial white folly – both interpretations are floated – it’s also a tale of a wider, wilder, analogue world of matter, and Dyas emphasises distance and scale throughout, especially with his rich use of audio. Tenuous phone calls relay Fiennes’s progress or arrival at some dicey extremity; even the myriad testimonies of acquaintances are phoned in rather than framed as talking heads, splitting the telling from the teller and evoking off-screen space. Fiennes himself speaks of summoning the ghosts of his father and grandfather – the male role models he never knew – to spur his advances. He gently bemoans his “failures” to break records – tolerable so long as rivals keep failing too – and one colleague scolds him for using the wrong “metric” in his selection of would-be firsts and feats to beat: “How insecure do you have to be?”

Yet there’s no sign of a hole in Fiennes’s heart when it comes to his relationship with his late wife Ginny, or indeed in our brief glimpse of his second marriage to Louise. A friend describes him as solid granite, “so classy you never know if there’s anything under the skin”; you almost wonder if Fiennes is exploring this very idea as he demonstrates how he removed his gangrenous fingers with a hacksaw in his garden shed. Whether watching him try to manoeuvre his beat-up Ford through a parking lot or dangle precariously from the precipice of Mount Eiger without recourse to those fingers, the film finds a warm, wryly absurdist vantage on a man who sometimes simply needs to step out of himself.

► Explorer is in UK cinemas now.