127 Hours
Aron Ralston is hiking through Canyonlands National Park in Utah when a rock he is leaning on gives way and he falls down a slot; his hand is pinned beneath said rock to the canyon wall. 127 Hours is the amount of time his hand is trapped beneath the rock.
This is a Danny Boyle film, no room for drudgery! Intricate escape scenarios ensue. Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” accompanies an attempt involving climbing rope and Ralston’s own body weight. The photography is vivid, colorful and dynamic. There are only a few moments where we are allowed to sit silently at the bottom of the canyon watching Ralston as he considers his own certain death. Instead, we are propelled head first towards the inevitable conclusion that Ralston reaches. He is going to sever his arm with a dull multipurpose blade from an off-brand Chinese import Leatherman. It’s gory and intense: the section where he has to cut through his own median nerve is overwhelming. There have been reports of audience members fainting at the Telluride Film Festival, Pixar and the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater. The audience at the Toronto Film Festival cheered when his arm finally came free and he left the bloody stump of his dead hand stuck in the rock. Danny Boyle deserves acclaim for eliciting an intense physical reaction from his audience with a piece of celluloid. He also deserves acclaim for bringing his audience to the point of empathy with his protagonist that we actually see self-amputation as a victory. It’s an achievement for a director to pull an audience so far out of of their own life that they can viscerally experience such an extreme situation.
Within the world of the canyon, there is a constantly shifting POV. We are in front of Aron, watching him film a farewell message to his family. We are at the bottom of his water bottle. We are inside his mouth as he drinks the urine he has deposited in his Camelbak. There is a high-octane rewind to the trunk of Ralston’s car to reveal a bottle of Gatorade that he’s dreaming about. The audience breathes deeply when the camera pulls away from him and shows us the landscape. For a moment we’re not down in a canyon, pinned beneath a rock, staring at James Franco as he goes from a jovial, athletic adventurer to a delusional victim of de-hydration, blood loss and starvation. These POVs alleviate the obvious drawback of the scenario of the film: We watch a man pinned under a rock at the bottom of a canyon as he approaches death, unmoving over the course of five and a half days.
Besides the more literal POVs, Boyle uses flashback and hallucination to illustrate the both the devolution of Ralston’s mind and the progression of his decision making towards the Main Event. As anyone in a movie does at the brink of death, he revisits family members, he considers regrets and lost loves. He examines Life in a complete way, considering the steps that physically and emotionally brought his to the place where the film takes place. Ralston’s progressively intensifying visions range from the mundane to the spiritual. There is a raven who visits him each day at the same time. There are wild horses that gallop across the sky revealed by the opening of the canyon. He conducts an impromptu talk show interview with his digital camera, playing both host and guest. He spends a night in bed with a former girlfriend (French, no less) and awakes find himself masturbating. It’s good he has a free hand.
All of these strategies are certainly effective in battling Boyle’s obvious fear: boring the audience. It is a short film (90 minutes) and we are not asleep or drifting or confused or tired of James Franco’s energetic performance. We are engrossed. However, there is a moment where the film steps outside the necessary. The culmination of Ralston’s hallucinations and the one that actually gives him the strength to sever his own arm is an image of his own unborn child in front of a brown couch. Not only is this a child who is yet to be conceived, Ralston hasn’t even met the woman with whom he’s going to have this child. The desire to procreate is evidently greater than the desire not to die at the bottom of a lonely canyon with your hand pinned underneath a rock. It is not Ralston’s ingenuity or his persistence that frees him from his predicament. It’s his desire to have a child. There is a lack of specificity here and an element of the ham-fisted.
It is one of the few missteps in the film. More emblematic of Boyle’s work is another scene. Again we are in one of Aron’s hallucinations (memories). The camera photographs a young Aron Ralston in his living room with a camcorder on his shoulder shooting his sister playing piano. It seems like it could be Christmas. The camcorder is leashed to the TV, which displays the image of his sister. His parents sit next to him on their sofa, watching the camcorder image of their daughter playing piano next to them in the same room. It’s a perfectly beautiful image, showing the bond between Ralston, his sister and his parents. It incorporates the photographic techniques that Boyle has been using throughout the film. It is eloquent and interesting. It is resonant without being maudlin. It appeals to the intellectual and the emotional in us simultaneously. It is a beautiful analogy for the tension between Ralston’s desire to be free and unshackled and his revelation that intimate human connection is important. It is the opposite of the banal, Hallmark-style tear-jerker of the unborn child.
Luca Borghese
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