127 Hours
Director: Danny Boyle
This film tells the true story of Aron Ralston, a climber who in 2003 became trapped in a canyon in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, his right arm pinned under a falling boulder. Most of the buzz about the movie centres on the climax, when Ralston breaks and then amputates his own arm to escape certain death.
Early reports of audience members passing out notwithstanding, that harrowing event accounts for a very brief, albeit jarringly realistic, episode in 127 Hours. Although Ralston’s act of desperation is admittedly difficult to watch, viewers who might avoid the film out of squeamishness would be depriving themselves of one of the year’s most exhilarating cinematic experiences.
British film-maker Danny Boyle, who directed Slumdog Millionaire, has solidified his stature as an artist possessed of a singular gift for aestheticising misery. With a nervy, vivid, visual style and a commitment to humanism at its most life-affirming, Boyle makes the unbearable not just endurable, but beautiful.
He’s helped enormously by James Franco, who embodies the intrepid outdoorsman’s exuberance and charm, but also his darker flip side of isolation and arrogance. When Ralston sets out for Blue John Canyon on a pristine April day, he has told no one where he’s going; his belief in his own physical and mental superiority makes him feel above the usual safety rules. That exceptionalism will prove pivotal once he’s trapped in a narrow sandstone crevice for five days.
But first, 127 Hours offers viewers a glimpse of what lures Ralston to the desert in the first place: in a wildly kinetic montage of split-screens, canted camera angles and giddy jump cuts, Boyle captures the adrenalin rushes and peak experiences that prove so addictive to Ralston and his fellow hikers and climbers. When he meets two cute fellow travellers (Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn) on the trail, he leads them to a sublime underwater pool where they splash and dive like sleek otters, ecstatic with their own ruddy good health and a benevolent natural world of near limitless scope and seductive pleasures.
As a portrait of youthful recklessness amid the grandeur of indifferent nature, 127 Hours is reminiscent of Sean Penn’s magnificent Into the Wild, about a similarly brash young man on his own physically extreme journey. Like that earlier film, Ralston’s story plays like a 21st century extension of the American transcendentalist tradition, where enlightenment and spiritual communion mesh so poetically with the rugged landscape of the country’s frontier. In Ralston’s case, mysticism arrives only after he’s brought his mechanical engineer’s ingenuity to bear on his predicament (to no avail). Once dehydration and delusion kick in, his flashbacks take on an increasingly hallucinatory quality, with 127 Hours taking on a commensurate magical-realist visual style.
As the character who virtually begins and ends his journey as two different men, Franco delivers the performance of a still-promising career.
Starting with the sublime TV show Freaks and Geeks through Milk and now 127 Hours, Franco has proved his gifts run deeper than mere boyish charisma. He carries this film with the same life force and complex emotions that animate Ralston himself, as he first tries to prevent and then make peace with and finally take charge of his fate.
As elemental and excruciatingly visceral as Ralston’s ordeal is, ultimately 127 Hours isn’t about the physical struggle for life as much as the psychic struggle to find meaningful connection within it. It’s a movie worth seeing, even when it’s barely watchable. – Washington Post