Danny Boyle (2010)
Changing the title of Aron Ralston’s autobiographical story Between a Rock and a Hard Place to 127 Hours may not have been Danny Boyle’s decision but it exudes commercial anxiety – as does his direction throughout the movie’s 94 minutes. (As far as the title is concerned, surely – after the huge success of Slumdog Millionaire – the people behind this film could have been confident it would get an audience? What’s more, the name they’ve ended up with would immediately have given away the story even if the picture hadn’t already achieved notoriety.) There’s a kind of empathy between the director and his hero or, at least, traction in their predicaments: Aron Ralston (James Franco), trapped at the bottom of Bluejohn Canyon in Utah with his right arm pinned by a boulder, has to keep thinking of ways of trying to escape; Danny Boyle is continuously driven towards finding new means of catching the eye. The latter is increasingly impatient for the 127 hours to be up – he seems more frightened than his protagonist of standing still. Boyle, who adapted Ralston’s book with Simon Beaufoy, isn’t prepared to try and dramatise the snail’s pace passage of time for Aron or how hard it is for the young man not to give up the struggle and the ghost. (He has Aron say, at one stage, ‘Keep it together, keep it together’ and, later on, ‘Time’s passing very slowly’, and that’s about it.) 127 Hours is already known as that-film-where-the-bloke-cuts-his-arm-off, as if there were nothing else in it (and it’s likely this is all it will be remembered for). It’s quite a bad film but it’s a bad film not because a man self-amputates but because of Danny Boyle’s mania for screen pyrotechnics.
In fact the confusion of horror, pain and hope that charges James Franco’s face and upper body as he carries out the operation makes this one of the strongest moments in 127 Hours for reasons other and better than shocking gory grisliness. I didn’t feel especially squeamish or disgusted when Aron turns surgeon (although audiences are now prepared in a way that those at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals where the movie premiered were not). The film is of course a one-man show and Franco is the positive reason for seeing it. In the few minutes of screen time before the accident happens, he establishes Aron Ralston’s cocky charm so strongly that you never lose the memory and allure of it while he’s stuck down the canyon. We see how Aron’s father (Treat Williams) introduced him, as a young boy, to the mountains where the accident occurs; we’re told that the terrain is a ‘second home’ to him. (I found it amazing that not only Aron but the two girl hikers (Amber Tamblyn and Kate Mara) he meets and shows off to shortly before his unexpected exile were so fearless in this terrifying, treacherous place.) The fact that he was an enthusiastic and experienced mountaineer and ‘canyoneer’ (which, according to a legend at the end of the film, he’s continued to be since this ordeal) was obviously an important ingredient in his survival; you get the sense that the ‘supreme selfishness’ with which Aron charges himself had a lot to do with it too. Franco’s portrait is never sentimental: as he showed in Milk, he can convey emotional depth and sincerity but these qualities are more or less absent here. It seems right, given the character that Franco’s created, that, when Aron tells the family he doesn’t expect to see again how much he loves them etc, there’s a hollow ring to his words – as if he can’t quite get the hang of feeling deeply. (It makes sense too that Aron, although he loses plenty in the course of 127 Hours, is never parted from his camcorder and never stops using it – his determination to leave this record for posterity shows his resilient egoism.) His experience in Bluejohn Cayon in April 2003 must of course have had a powerful effect on Aron Ralston but it’s a relief that he’s not obviously presented by the end of the film as A Changed Man.
Thanks to Franco, I was more engaged by 127 Hours than I expected to be, and there were plenty of things that went down well with me. Aron’s constrained physical situation means he couldn’t devise all manner of ingenious escape strategies for me to fail to understand. Playing ‘Lovely Day’ on the soundtrack at the start of another 24 hours down in the canyon for Aron may be lead-weight irony but there’s never a bad time to hear Bill Withers’ song. It’s also interesting to be made conscious, in the way you’re made conscious here, of your divided feelings as a viewer who knows what’s going to happen. You want Aron/Franco to be free but you also want an easy time: it’s a reprieve when he abandons his first two attempts on the right arm with his blunt, cheap Chinese penknife. It’s always tantalising – that is the operative word – that so little of his body appears to be trapped, so utterly, by the chockstone. The film’s colouring is very effective too. The intense orange and blue of the landscape and sky are easily contrasted with the down-the-canyon palette: it’s cruelly apt that Aron’s T shirt is orange while his complexion gets to be colour-coordinated with the greyish rocks that surround him. When, during the arm surgery, his face is splashed with his own blood, Aron acquires the look, as Ryan Gilbey pointed out in The New Statesman, of a Francis Bacon painting.
The film starts with a triple split-screen effect that Boyle uses persistently. The whizzbang editing and loudly pulsing music on the soundtrack give the impression that 127 Hours is simply picking up where Slumdog Millionaire left off – especially as one of the trio of images is an Indian crowd (as one of several illustrations of teeming humanity). With its breakneck speed and flashy privileging of the instant impact over the meaning of its images, the beginning of 127 Hours comes over like a trailer rather than a film proper but it’s shallowly dazzling. The speed has its own exhilaration: Franco is in perfect tempo with it, the sequences in which he and the two girls dive from a high ledge into a lake below are amusingly thrilling. But, as soon as Aron has gone down the rabbit hole, Boyle hits problems. The director wants hyperkinetic spectacle – he gets himself some just about legitimately through Aron’s flashbacks, fantasies and hallucinations during the coming days but he has to cheat in other respects. He sometimes shows the awesome, turbulent qualities of the landscape not from Aron’s point of view or imagination and barely to show us what the captive is missing – just to keep the show on the road. And the split screen comes to seem inappropriately heartless for the matter-of-life-and-death story Boyle is telling. Aron eventually climbs out of his prison and sees an apparent mirage of other human beings who can help him. Of course you’re rooting for him and yelling with him at the three walkers shimmering in the distance – it would take a heart harder than the wretched boulder not to well up when they turn out not to be a mirage, when they hear and turn to him. Even here, though, Danny Boyle refuses to calm down and uses sharp cutting and aggressive music. The sequence might have been more powerful if it had been simpler, quieter – with fewer cuts and with Aron’s desperate calls the only sound against the silence.
Boyle is congenitally overactive: his films seem to be taking place in the mind of someone on speed. This works satisfyingly in Trainspotting and effectively, in the context of the movie, in Slumdog Millionaire (although I don’t like the film). Boyle is the wrong director for this material, though – although perhaps there isn’t a right director. Boyle has been quoted as saying that, as soon as he read Aron Ralston’s book, he knew it would make a great film but, apart from the uplifting human endurance aspect, I’m not sure why. I imagine that Ralston’s book describes what he thought and felt, as well as what he did and fantasised about, during the five days he spent alone: there are inherent challenges to dramatising those thoughts and feelings. James Franco uses his eyes very expressively to convey Aron’s shock and fear (and the determination to hold onto his fear because any strong emotion will help keep him going) and I wouldn’t have wanted a continuous voiceover speaking Aron’s thoughts. But there’s no way that Franco can convey through only his face, and without anyone to interact with, all that’s happening inside Aron’s head. An inherent advantage of the material, however, is that we get to know Aron as a physical presence very well – the sense of him as a human organism trying to stay alive is powerful. As with Slumdog, the score is by A R Rahman and Anthony Dod Mantle (this time with Enrique Chediak) is the cinematographer. The editing is by John Harris.
11 January 2011
