"You gonna see 127 Hours?"
"Is that the movie where the guy has to cut off his arm?"
"Yeah."
There've been a lot of those sorts of conversations lately in the office, as coworkers around me try to decide whether or not to see a movie that seems pre-made to ward away the squeamish. For my part, I was mainly attracted by Boyle's involvement; if he's not one of my favorite filmmakers (the only film of his, till now, that I can say I like unreservedly is Trainspotting), he's usually interesting to watch, not least because he employs a lot of cinematic tricks and techniques, a few of which may have an outside chance of permanently modifying the grammar of filmmaking.
Boyle's name has become synonymous with a hyper-kinetic, "extreme" style of filmmaking, not only in his choice of music or camera angle or editing pace, but in his choice of situation. The famous "toilet bowl" sequence in Trainspotting established his fondness for making his characters do things that people in the audience would most likely not do. He seems attracted to stories in which the characters are driven by circumstance or addiction or personality to perform the unthinkable. Self-amputation, the subject of 127 Hours, certainly falls into that category. None of us particularly wants to be stuck down a canyon with our arm pinned to a rock and forced to chop off our own hand in order to survive. But when the situation is presented to us, we can't help wondering, "would I be able to do that?" In my case, I have no idea whether I would or wouldn't, though I incline to "no." Supposedly, adrenaline and fear and other survival mechanisms might make us able to do things we would have thought impossible. The task Boyle sets for himself in this film is to recreate, using all his powers and all his skills, the state of mind that drove Aaron Ralston (the guy on whose real-life story 127 Hours is based) to hack through nerve and sinew with a cheap dull knife.
The film is, among other things, a parable -- a tale of moral correction, in which Ralston (played with tremendous likability by James Franco), initially seen as a hubristic loner who can take or leave the rest of the human race and finds his greatest joy carousing in the wilderness a hundred miles from civilization, learns the value of human connection, that no man is an island, and so on. There's an almost Dickensian quality to the film's second half, as an increasingly exhausted and thirst-benumbed Ralston hallucinates various characters out of his past, his future, and historical legend. He's learning his lesson, and these ghosts will guide him to the truth. That's all well and good, but not the most interesting part of the film.
Where Boyle achieves his greatest cinematic successes here is in the way he draws from a cornucopia of pop-culture references and modes of expression to evoke Ralston's state of mind. This is a guy for whom canyon-delving is less about grim Survival than about the joy of extreme-sports intensity. After all, unlike the prospector protagonist of Jack London's seminal survival-fiction story To Build A Fire, Ralston isn't there for any reason except, well, to be there. He seems to have grown up watching a lot of Mountain Dew commercials, and, once trapped, he often visualizes the elusive paradises of the civilized world in these terms. As he sits stuck in his canyon, the precious hours ticking by and the irreplaceable water in his bottle dwindling, he imagines a cascade of soda-pop and beer advertisements, all intercut into a seamless montage of cool, refreshing deliciousness. He defines the joys of civilization as a sexy, youthful party that seems to be a Coors ad come to life. He's haunted by visions of a giant inflatable Scooby Doo; the justification for which is a bit too complex to get into here. In a sequence which may or may not be occurring in his head, Ralston videotapes himself describing his predicament schizophrenically, in the personality of a smarmy TV talk-show host who's interviewing the "real" Ralston and cackling with amusement at the foolishness of going hiking alone without leaving a note for anybody. Watching this sequence, I was reminded of the Rodney Dangerfield sitcom sequence in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. As in that film, unthinkable horrors are filtered in the protagonist's mind through the ostensibly-sanitizing format of a mass-audience TV show, resulting in a crazed funhouse distortion. 127 Hours is, however, nowhere near as dark a film as Natural Born Killers -- at heart it's a tale of Survival Uplift in the tradition of Alive -- and though Ralston comes close to cracking now and again, he keeps his head and Does What Has To Be Done.
As for the self-amputation scene, it shows a lot, and the squeamish may want to avert their eyes; but it's not quite as harrowing as we fear it will be. Boyle's restless style undercuts the tension -- mercifully, perhaps. The camera cuts around so rapidly from Gory Arm to Franco's Face and back again, viewing the action from so many different angles, that the result feels more like a bad drug trip than a desperate surgical procedure. Part of me wanted Boyle to turn the volume down here, settle the camera into a few simple angles, and try to evoke in documentary terms what it would really be like. I guess the idea is, we're looking at what it was really like inside Ralston's head. But I was never able to make the mental leap along with him -- I walked out of the theater with no more insight into whether I would be able to do such a thing myself. Franco grimaces gamely, but as he digs around and severs tendons, he doesn't seem to be undergoing that much more pain than you might do if you were removing a piece of glass in your foot. I guess one can only scream so loud, grit one's teeth so hard, grimace so intensely. The rest belongs to a subjective experience that, try as he might, Boyle cannot authentically reproduce. Which is probably a good thing, all in all.
127 Hours is a more focused and more entertaining film than Boyle's Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, and it owes a great deal to Franco, who mostly gets the job done and holds the screen admirably well for 100 minutes. His most moving bit of acting is one of the least flashy, when -- fearing imminent death -- he records a brief "goodbye-I-love-you" message to his parents on his video camera. His sentiments are sincere, but he recites them in a curiously flat, childlike, dutiful way. Franco catches the signature sound of certain irony-steeped Generation Y folks who are uncomfortable with direct expression of emotion and who never quite seem able to take the quotes off.
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