In the summer of 2003 Aron Ralston rose to fame for surviving five days pinned by his arm under a boulder while exploring canyons in Utah. A typical reaction from someone learning about the price Ralston ultimately paid for his life and freedom tended to involve the question, “What if that had been me?”
In following up his award-winning Slumdog Millionaire with 127 Hours, starring James Franco as Ralston and named for those five days of stranded helplessness, director Danny Boyle aims to let audiences answer that question for themselves.
With a tight focus on Ralston’s adventure, soon giving way to his singular and unenviable predicament, 127 Hours capitalizes on Franco’s energy and everyman quality to effectively put viewers into Ralston’s shoes – a better job of it would require virtual reality.
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127 Hours Directed by Danny Boyle. |
But while Boyle succeeds eerily well at eliciting a visceral reaction with his material – some viewers fainted at the TIFF premiere – in tinkering with his audience’s guts he has forgotten about that other important organ, the heart.
The way the film strictly limits itself to Ralston’s ordeal is both an advantage and a weakness: it’s easy to identify with him because the lights go down and the adventure’s starting – you’re him. At the same time, it’s hard to feel much beyond the grimace-inducing physicality of Ralston’s trauma because we never get to know him as anything more than a shell of a person for our temporary inhabitation.
Even at 95 minutes the proceedings feel stretched, so there was no excuse to forego the usual character-building stuff. Aside from the casting of Franco, our only clue that this is a normal, likeable guy and not some The Hills Have Eyes antagonist comes from an early scene in which Ralston helps reorient two lost hikers (Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn) and then leaves them to their journey – but not before they invite him to a party he will attend only in the wishful delirium of agony and dehydration.
Clumsily bookended by crowd shots of marathon runners which seem to say, unconvincingly, “this could be you,” even as they plug us into Ralston’s active lifestyle – imagine if Open Water had opened and closed with scenes from a water park – 127 Hours leaps right into the titular five-day adventure with a rollicking soundtrack and breathless editing that makes liberal use of the split-screen effect.
This signature audio-visual intensity of Boyle’s is what allows the film to halfway succeed in its conceit as a subjective record of Ralston’s ordeal: languishing with Ralston as he chips fruitlessly away at the boulder with a dull blade he will eventually put to another purpose, we experience his memories, hallucinations and desires alongside him in an inward-focused analogue to the popular “found footage” gimmick.
But we don’t want to be privy to the mom-dad-sister stuff beyond a few glimpsed vignettes: we don’t know them – truly, we don’t even know Aron – so it’s not comfortable or necessary, much less revelatory, to hear the confessions, thank-yous, and sorrys Ralston speaks into his video recorder as dehydration, fatigue, stress, and shock all combine to drag him into delusion.
A scene in which a delirious Ralson interviews himself on his own morning show – complete with laugh track – largely fails to add any levity to the situation.
But how else do you make five days under a boulder interesting to watch? This is just a footnote in a regular story: the scene where the main character’s keys fall through a grate at the worst possible moment and he has to stretch and strain to reach them with one fingertip but of course he manages to get them and goes merrily on his way.
That it’s all true does give 127 Hours a certain leeway: it’s almost less a story than a roller coaster for your sympathetic nervous system, steeped in the knowledge that Ralston actually underwent all this.
Danny Boyle’s flair for direction make this well worth an hour and a half, but lacking scope as well as any cerebral or emotional heft, 127 Hours does not seem likely to echo into ubiquity in the fashion of Boyle’s previous works, Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, and Slumdog Millionaire.