127 Hours

Surely by now most movie fans know what to expect when seeing 127 Hours: a guy cut his own arm off. And with a dull knife, to boot. I'm here to report that that scene, which is essentially the climax of the film, is as grisly and watch-through-your fingers as one can imagine (it's not the sound of the breaking bone, but instead the snipping of tendons as if they were piano wire that induces the willies). Fortunately, what leads up to that moment is perpetually gripping.

James Franco stars as Aron Ralston, who loves to go biking and hiking through Canyonlands National Park in Utah. He sets off one night, sleeps in his car, and is up at dawn to explore. He tells no one where he is going. After frolicking with a pair of female hikers in a hidden pool (Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn), he sets off on his own and manages to fall down a slim chasm, a rock falling and wedging his arm against the canyon wall.

This happens only about fifteen minutes into the film, so director Danny Boyle doesn't waste much time with a set-up. The rest of the film is Franco, dealing with his situation, and the audience squirming along with him.

A film like this is ideal for spotlighting the talent of a director and an actor. Given the limited space of the location, where Franco is trapped for ninety-percent of the film, Boyle wondrously makes things visually interesting, sometimes too much so (I'm not sure why he includes scenes of a large mass of people in what looks like India--left over footage from Slumdog Millionaire?). There are many uses of split screen, and when Franco hallucinates a thunderstorm it's as tumultuous as any gothic horror movie.

As for Franco, he's up to the challenge, though we are limited in knowing what kind of guy Ralston is. As he contemplates his mortality in that canyon we get a lot of flashbacks to his childhood, as well as glimpses of an old girlfriend (Clemence Poesy), but these scenes don't really have anything to add. The childhood stuff seems exceedingly normal, and we know that he and Poesy break up at a basketball game, but I'm not sure why. The film does not succeed as treatise on fathers and sons, or anything profound, as Sean Penn's Into the Wild did.

But taken as a stripped-down survival tale, 127 Hours is great stuff. The photography by Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak makes excellent use of the scenery, and the music by A.R. Rahman mixes well with the tension of the situation, particularly in the amputation scene.

127 Hours succeeds best at asking questions that have open answers: How did he endure the pain? What would we do, in the same situation? Why didn't he have a cell phone?

My grade for 127 Hours: A-.