Directrospective: 127 HOURS (2010)
Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.
Self-sufficient outdoorsman Aron Ralston (James Franco) has gotten himself into a bit of a jam.
I remember the story, of course. The hiker guy, or maybe he was a rock climber or something, who got stuck under a boulder and ended up cutting off his own arm to escape. Danny Boyle’s making the movie about that guy? OK. James Franco? Sure, fine. It’ll be some kind of survival adventure movie with lots of swooping helicopter shots of mountain vistas and a really gnarly self-amputation scene in the middle. Mostly this guy stumbling through forests with a bloody stump while house music plays, probably.
Buzzer noise! Wrong! Almost the whole movie is Franco pinned under the rock! He wasn’t even in the mountains, he was in canyon sort of underground but also not underground! No vistas available! One of the big dramatic beats is when he finally drinks his own piss!
Boyle’s ninth feature, adapted from canyoneer Aron Ralston’s 2004 memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place, which was in turn adapted from the time he got stuck in a canyon and cut his own arm off, is on its face a bit of a gimmick film. You wouldn’t be totally out of line to lump it in with other very contained, single-performer films from around the same time like BURIED (Ryan Reynolds in a coffin, 2010), ALL IS LOST (Robert Redford on a small boat, 2013), the excellent LOCKE (Tom Hardy on speakerphone in a car, 2013), and, a bit later, THE SHALLOWS (Blake Lively on a rock vs. a shark, 2016 [more on that one here]). These in turn owe a lot to two films from a decade prior, CAST AWAY (Tom Hanks on a desert island, 2000) and PHONE BOOTH (Colin Farrell, location obvious, 2002). Much fun was made at the time of the mismatch between the subject matter and Boyle’s stylistic tics, too, like Nuri Bilge Ceylan doing a car chase film or Michael Mann making a movie with several women in it. The jokes are easy. And while it’s thoroughly unsubtle and visually over the top and as sappy as it is gruesome, 127 HOURS is one of Boyle’s most artistically successful films.
Not a ton happens, all told. Seasoned mountaineer Aron Ralston (James Franco) heads out to Canyonlands National Park for some hiking and mountain biking. He’s alone, and likes it that way, plus he knows what he’s doing. He stops to give some pointers to a couple of lost young women (Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn), and ends up taking them to a hidden pool, in the process helping us to understand why this guy is alone - he’s definitely a weirdo, creepy at first if ultimately well-intended. He’s what happens when a real dork feels comfortable in his own physical body. He’s also a bit of a psycho when it comes to personal endangerment. He leaves the women to their basic business and gets back to his hiking. Today Ralston’s here to climb around in Bluejohn Canyon. Nobody knows that, because he doesn’t need anybody’s help. Then a nasty slip finds him standing at the bottom of a small slot canyon, maybe four feet wide, his right forearm wedged between the canyon wall and a boulder that fell down with him. Really wedged in there. He calls for help, but he knows his chances are very slim. Nobody knows he’s here, and nobody’s really expecting him to be anywhere for a while. He makes use of his wilderness survival skills to problem-solve, but he’s pretty fucked. He has a camcorder with him and keeps a video diary addressed to his parents in the likely event he dies before he’s found. He knows he’s going to run out of water. He thinks about all the mistakes he’s made, all the ways he kept people at a distance, and how refusing to depend on other people for anything has gotten him stuck under a boulder alone. He hallucinates. After being trapped for, say, 122 hours, he prepares to die for his hubris. Suddenly, he has a vision of himself with a son, and decides he wants to live and change. He breaks the bones of his forearm and uses the multi-tool to cut through the flesh - though “cut” is a generous description of what his horribly dulled tool can do. He escapes, runs into some hikers, is rescued by helicopter. He gets married and has a son in montage. He doesn’t stop hiking alone, but he’s learned to always leave a note.
The film is Boyle’s first and, to date, sole feature screenwriting credit, alongside SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE writer Simon Beaufoy. This isn’t a script that bounced around Hollywood before Boyle put his spin on it. It was planned as a Boyle picture from the start. To give you some sense of how uncompromised the film is in its full Boyleishness, the movie that’s almost entirely one guy who doesn’t move is Boyle’s only film with two cinematographers. Old reliable Anthony Dod Mantle got an assist from cinematographer of the 2007 Boyle-produced sequel 28 WEEKS LATER Enrique Chediak because there was so much work to do.
To say the whole movie is stuck in the canyon would be disingenuous, of course. Dreams and flashbacks and hallucinations allow Boyle to put Ralston in cars and houses and other landscapes, and to have him interact with people like his parents (Treat Williams and Kate Burton) and an ex-girlfriend (Clémence Poésy). A whole lot of it is in that canyon, though. What makes the film great, and part of what I imagine drew Boyle to the story, is that it exhausts nearly every conceivable place a camera could go within the hundred or so cubic feet around where Ralston is stuck. As he put it in an interview around the film’s release, it’s “an action movie with a guy who can’t move.” Boyle lets no action go undramatized. Besides the action in Ralston’s mind, there are inside-the-CamelBak shots of his dwindling water supply trickling precariously toward his mouth, a daring toe-gripped stick rescue of his multi-tool from the out-of-reach place where he’s dropped it, and a thrilling sequence in which he needs to throw a loop of climbing rope just right in order to construct a pulley system that might free the rock. Mantle and Chediak blend celluloid and digital with the grungy footage from Ralston’s camcorder into a mix of clashing visual textures that keeps things propulsive, too, and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE composer A.R. Rahman returns with some music I don’t much remember but assume probably helped.
Dookie Boyle, emboldened by the success of dung-filled bildungsroman SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, really outdoes himself here with action shots not only of the CamelBak filling up with Ralston’s dijon thirst piss, but of the piss’s P.O.V. as he chugs it and tries not to puke it all back up. If we take every bodily fluid to be of a form of piss or shit, and I do, Dookie Boyle is responsible also for the much-ballyhooed amputation scene. The director, the star, and makeup effects designer Tony Gardner have all spoken about the responsibility they felt to respect the gnarliness of the real-life Ralston’s experience, and I’d say they succeed. It’s bloody, no question, but the lack of exaggerated arterial spray or excess gore makes it even harder to watch. There’s no guillotine swiftness in Bluejohn Canyon. Relatively brief as the sequence may be (Ralston describes the real process as taking an hour), we endure every step of the procedure from the shattering of bones through each layer of skin, fat, muscle, gristle, and nerve tissue. Some audience members supposedly needed medical attention during early screenings, according to breathless press releases by people whose job it is to make their movie sound interesting. But it’s pretty goddamned gnarly. Ralston himself described 127 HOURS as the best movie he’d ever seen, which I gotta say is an incredible joke. I bet he never related so much to a movie before in his life.
There’s no question that the level of gore is balanced with an equal level of schmaltz, but I think it works. First of all, the guy’s barely slept in five days and he’s dying of thirst. We can forgive him if his ecstatic revelations aren’t terribly nuanced. More than that, the broad sentimental journey Ralston goes through matches the elemental spareness of the story. The paradoxical impulses at the heart of Boyle’s work as a director, his in-your-face visual style and his soft, normy themes, find in this revolting fable something close to their ideal subject.