127 Hours is, so far, my pick for the most overrated movie of the year.
Don’t get me wrong, 127 Hours is not a bad film, it’s just one that doesn’t really strike me as having a particular point of view or an interest in characterization. For some folks, that won’t be an issue, they’ll walk into the film wanting to see a man stuck in a perilous situation for an hour and change and then cut his arm off. For those folks, that will be enough and they’ll walk out satisfied. But for me, I need arcs, I need characters, I need to walk out of a film knowing more than when I walked into it.
I don’t know Aron Ralston any better now that I’ve seen a movie about him than I did before I walked into it. Before the film started, I knew him as the guy who cut his arm off because he was trapped in a crevice for five days, his arm pinned by a rock. Now that I’ve seen the film and had a day to digest it, I will still think of him in the exact same way. He is still nothing but a fascinating symbol of the human will for survival.
And all of that is fine and dandy, except that a film is an opportunity to shape that symbol into a character and bring him into focus. Danny Boyle instead eschews traditional narrative tropes that would have worked to the film’s benefit, instead just giving us minute after minute of James Franco screaming and gasping and slowly dying of thirst. And while I admire Boyle’s courage in trying to make an interesting movie about this struggle, I don’t think he completely hits the mark.
Imagine Into the Wild, except the entire film is set in the “magic bus” at the end of the film. After all, that part of Chris McCandless’ life is what brought him to our attention to begin with; had he not died in that bus, nobody would have known who he was. But instead, the film travels back to give us a picture of how this character came to get to that bus, what drove him as a person. As a result, when McCandless dies, we feel we have known this character and feel the loss of him. Conversely, in 127 Hours, we don’t feel like we know Aron Ralston at all, so we he finally decides to cut his arm off, I didn’t feel the film earned that moment. I didn’t understand what that moment meant to Ralston or what it was supposed to mean to us beyond the surface act of actually doing it.
The film gives us snippets of Ralston’s life, of how he doesn’t return his mother’s calls and his fractured relationship with a girlfriend. But I’m not sure what these snippets signify other than that Ralston had lived a fairly normal life and had fairly ordinary motivations to get out of this situation. This would have been the film’s opportunity to deepen the characterization of Aron by deepening his relationships with the people around him. One could say that, “oh, but what if those relationships were boring in real-life?” Well, this is a fictionalized account of what happened, the film therefore has license to change things around in order to fit the screen in a more interesting way. That is the difference between feature and documentary filmmaking, the ability to shift the truth (and some would argue that documentary does the same thing). I guarantee you that there are many elements of 127 Hours that were completely made up, but even if Boyle didn’t want to invent something entirely that would make Aron’s past more interesting, I’m sure there must have been something already there. Human beings are inherently complicated, I’m sure there was something in Aron’s past that would capture our attention and make us care more about his plight.
Instead the first half of the film is especially trying to watch because it’s, frankly, boring. After the initial fall in the crevice, all I was thinking was, “how long until he cuts off his damned arm?” because much of the running time is focused on Aron chipping away at the rock with the knife he eventually uses to do the deed. There are a few good moments where Aron talks to the camcorder he brought with him (the best moment in the film is probably the “talk show scene”), but I didn’t like the fake “escape” sequence. If you have to pad your running time by including a five minute long scene that didn’t actually happen, then you might want to think about how to better structure your film.
James Franco is good in the role, but I don’t understand the unanimous acclaim for his performance because I don’t know what he does that another (good) actor couldn’t have done. The role doesn’t demand that much from its actor other than to scream a lot; there are very few choices that an actor could make that would change the complexity of the character. If you had replaced Franco with, say, Jake Gyllenhaal, would the film/performance be vastly different? Franco was certainly convincing in the role, probably his best performance to date, but I’m not convinced of its greatness, especially in a year with so many fantastic lead performances.
As for Danny Boyle, I suppose this is the kind of film you’re allowed to make after you win an Oscar, but I was disappointed with a lot of the visual “tricks” he used in order to keep the story entertaining. A lot of the close-ups of the water being drunk reminded me of Aronofsky’s work in Requiem for a Dream, only not done as effectively. I always found that Boyle has had a lot of trouble with the endings of his films (besides Shallow Grave and Trainspotting) and at least here, he found one with a ready-made perfect ending.
The scene of the actual arm-cutting itself wasn’t as disgusting as I anticipated it would be. Blood doesn’t have the same effect it once did, but the moments where he has to break the bone and then cut through nerve endings were powerfully rendered.
But I got the feeling as the film went on, careening towards its inevitable conclusion that I was essentially watching a snuff film minus the death. There are some that would be excited by that prospect, but I’m not one of them.
