In April 2003, 27-year-old outdoorsman Aron Ralston hiked the sandstone trails of Blue John Canyon, near Moab, Utah, only to become trapped by a dislodged boulder that crushed his right hand and pinned him to an extremely narrow canyon wall. Without a cell phone and without a companion, he quickly recognized that he was utterly on his own. He didn’t even leave a note to say where he’d be going.
Under the exuberant guidance of Danny Boyle (the director responsible for “28 Days Later,” “Trainspotting” and Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire”), what might have been an arid docudrama based on Ralston’s bestselling memoir “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” is instead “127 Hours” – a gripping, visually engaging piece of storytelling.
The film, as per Boyle’s style, is bright and frenetic. Scenes swelling with people and noise are juxtaposed with scenes of objects out of a still life and wide, silent shots of the horizon. The screen is often split twice and thrice to add emphasis and draw connections between disparate images. The difficulty of Aron’s isolation, which elsewhere might have hinged purely on the actor’s talent, is in part alleviated by the kinetic energy driving Boyle and his cinematographers, Enrique Chediak and Anthony Dod Mantle. The two cinematographers, it appears, went wild in the beauty of Utah’s sprawling natural landscape. The confines of the space do not stifle the story but rather allow the production team the opportunity to think creatively inside the box. They succeed magnificently, for they fashion an incredibly compelling illusion of movement in spite of the static location.
To be sure, the performance that James Franco delivers as Aron Ralston would have been enough to carry the film had nothing else been up to par. His staggering range of emotions exceeds the challenge posed by “127 Hours,” which in many ways is a one-man show. He moves from affable to solemn, despairing to stunned, with dexterity and nuance. Each moment is executed with absolute precision – and it’s not only the extremes that Franco captures, but the subtle middle ground. Franco knows what drives Ralston, when he’s rational and when he’s lost it and when he’s navigating the dim route in between.
The story, adapted for the screen by Boyle and Simon Beaufoy, also works to enliven the otherwise static setting and lone character. We see Ralston’s memories, his regrets, his hallucinations and his premonitions, wherein the other people in his life offer distinct perspectives on who Ralston is: the brother of a young woman who is to be married, a guy who is, perhaps, doomed to loneliness, and the future father of a little boy. We also see Ralston interacting with himself through a video camera. He begins by addressing the unfortunate person who finds the camera and Ralston’s remains, but transitions to apologizing to his parents and, finally, coming to the stark realization – with a somber “oops” – that he is the only one to blame in this situation.
Until that moment when the boulder falls on Aron’s arm, the story plays out like a horror movie. Ralston, joined quickly by two pretty hikers, talks about how the earth is always moving. Boyle draws our attention to his hands as they glide along the great surfaces of boulders and canyon passes. We watch in fear, waiting for the painful moment we know is coming, but unsure of when it will strike. The tension is visceral.
While Boyle’s active style of filmmaking and Franco’s keen intelligence and comical energy, along with A. R. Rahman’s (“Slumdog Millionaire”) triumphant score, go to great lengths to craft each brilliant moment of “127 Hours,” a little more is to be desired. Ralston’s folly of selfishness is overlooked, and the gravity of his plight, while played out on a sensual level, does not soar to existential heights. In this way, “127 Hours” falls somewhat short of “Into the Wild,” in which the protagonist Christopher McCandless plunges to greater, more profound depths that affect the audience’s hearts rather than their nervous systems.
This complaint is, however, slight. Ralston’s story is different from McCandless’, for Ralston himself maintains a certain sanity, a shocking streak of practicality, which sets him apart. The fact that Ralston has the presence of mind to break both his radius and his ulna, and then sever his soft tissues and tendons with a dull knife, changes the scope of the story. Boyle isn’t interested in a romantic search for self that basks in awe of the numinous, but a hard and fast tale of survival and lust for life.“127 Hours” is a gritty film that thrives on the tensions set by man vs. self and man vs. nature.
By throwing these conflicts together, Boyle depicts a social image of man, who, as it turns out, is unable to face the natural world alone. He also shows, with manic bravura, to what great lengths a human being will go to live.