Cinema 2011 #6: 127 Hours

If you found yourself caught between a very real rock and a hard place, what lengths would you be willing to go to in order to save yourself? That’s the tough decision facing real-life mountain climber and canyoneering Aron Ralston, when he tumbles down a ravine wall in the Blue John Canyon of the Moab desert in Utah. Finding his right forearm pinned between the gorge’s wall and a large boulder, he spends the next 5 days trying to figure out how to save himself from his rocky restraint, hypothermia, starvation and dehydration.*SPOILER WARNING*

With no other option, Ralston makes the impossible decision to cut off his own arm.

While this may at first appear to be a surviving the odds film in the ilk of Cast Away or Alive, Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours is truly a film worthy of your attention. It is a disaster movie, but on such a small scale that its immediacy grips you tighter than you’ll be clutching the armrest for the final reels’ warts and all reality. If anything, the theme of this film is the duality of capture and release; Ralston is constantly seeking the salvation of the mountain top, a relief from the humdrum rat race of modern life, but it is this freedom and self-sought isolation that so endangers his life when, for want of a better word, he just needs a helping hand.

James Franco does a refined and appealing job as Ralston, managing to be both annoying and tragic at the same time; there’s no denying it, at first Aron is a bit of a smug jackass, ignoring his mother and sister’s messages, failing to really plan out his trip to the point of telling no one where he’s going, not selfish, rather self-centred. But in recognising his own fallibility, you cannot but share his sense of frustration and exhaustion. You’ll bask in every moment of precious sunlight that warms his frozen feet. You’ll wince at every wasted drop of water that misses his cracked lips. Franco’s performance, often head-on into camcorder as Ralston records his farewell messages to his family, carries a pathos, and you really believe that this man is never going to give up the fight despite the looming spectre of death behind every shadowy twist of this cavernous ravine.

But, truth be told, this is Boyle’s film; the director weaves together a beautifully shot film that nabs the immediacy of Ralston’s plight against the vast backdrop of the endless desert vista. As saturated colours give way to gloomy gullies, the use of light, and particularly sound, adds to the experience. And as for that little matter of the amputation… it treads that finest of lines between being both honest and graphic without being gratuitous, with Glenn Freemantle’s sound design helping this scene stand out from the Giallo gornography of the contemporary horror as one of the finest you’ll see in 2011.

Not flawless, however. The failing battery as a metaphor for Ralston’s situation is more dense than the rock crushing Aron’s arm, while the dream-like flashes into his mind lack that fleeting sense of a life slipping out of his fingertips that they’re going for. But these are minor quibbles in a drama that is a testament to the stubbornness of the human spirit. Truly gripping.

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