127 Hours

Requiring a significant stretch of the imagination to be able to call myself an outdoorsy-type, I often have a hard time getting excited to watch movies about extreme people in extreme conditions.  The idea of someone out by themselves in nature doesn’t often inspire great story-telling.  I see a lot of walks through scenic settings, soft music in the background.  We are meant to see why these people are where they are, wish we had what it took to forsake our materialistic lives in the name of something purer, a bucolic life.

Maybe its my Pacific Northwest upbringing; a region so varied and beautiful all within two hours’ drive and even within the city, that the idea of escaping civilization seems trite to me.  I’ve never had that problem.

But 127 Hours is one of several films that have proven to be much more interesting than I originally imagined.  Given further thought, I can now see how the appeal to the story might lie in other places than the beautiful landscapes.  What does it take for a man to mutilate himself?  How long must he wait?  Does dementia have to set in, can a person of fit mind really do something like that to himself?

I remember hearing the story when it actually happened, wondering at what point I would break, if I could indeed do such a thing.  But it was a distant thought, something that gave me pause for a few minutes, shaking it off with a quick look of disgust and disbelief.  I didn’t internalized it.  Getting my hand caught in a rock out in the middle of nowhere seemed like a very small possibility, the odds have to be in the trillions, so I never felt the need to concern myself too much with a hypothetical test of will.

So I do have to admire Danny Boyle (writer/director) for taking the time to look into what makes a person like Aron Ralston tick.  Here was a guy who would go out into the Utah desert for days at a time without telling a soul or concerning himself with any kind of emergency contingency plan.  People like Boyle and Jon Krakauer have a gift for looking into what makes people do potentially fatal things, and how they handle the pressure when things do go wrong.

127 Hours turned out to be a great study in what made Boyle tick.  Through flashbacks and hunger-induced hallucinations (a predictable plot device as the audience probably doesn’t want to watch all six days of Ralston trying to escape in a row) we see a life of solitude and alienation.  Ralston ignores his parents and his sister.  We see that he breaks up with his girlfriend (at a Jazz game of all places!) in an Ebenezer Scrooge-like fit of silence, Aron sits through a one-sided argument with his girlfriend wherein he’s too proud to ask her not to leave.  Her final condemnation that he will always be lonely is a summation of the message of the film (laid on quite thickly): singularity is suicide.

But his pride is common among men, and many have found themselves in his situation due to stubborn, dumb-ass pride.  It’s the other edge of the sword in the strong independent male.  They have to be independent, there’s no other way.

As for the film itself, I think it deserves extra points in the Degree of Difficulty category.  The very fact that most people know the story already pretty much guarantees it won’t win Best Picture or get a large audience.  Not because popular stories don’t sell, but because the nature of this story (on the surface) does not lend itself to excitement and attention-grabbing scenes.  I rolled my eyes when I’d heard it was made into a film, and I really wasn’t looking forward to watching it.  I have to figure mine was not the only reaction of that nature, and to make this into something appealing to a mass audience is damned near impossible, not even worth trying.  Boyle did better to stay true to the story and count on a core audience of action junkies and morbid freaks who want to see just how gory the big scene in the end really is (I thought it was pretty fuckin’ raw, personally).  A stomach-churning story of this nature is not born for mass appeal.

James Franco got a lot of credit for his acting, as well he should.  But I don’t believe his role was as challenging as he may have been credited.  His demons were laid out pretty early on and following scenes reinforced them, pounding a lot of nuance and complexity out of his character.

And it is that lack of grace that I feel will cost this film a Best Picture award.  I think Boyle was very upfront with what he was trying to say, and surely it is a message worth delivering.  But it was done in a somewhat clumsy manner, and the viewer is left with little to contemplate, other than whether they would have the guts to do what Ralston did.  I want to put this film in the top three solely on the fact that Boyle was able to make a very difficult story to tell look easy.  But I am having a hard time with that.  I think this film would have received honorable mention in the five-picture era.  But it’s really only a good movie standing up against the great ones of the season.

We’ve got to review one more movie before the big night.  I’m getting knock-kneed.

Alouishis