"127 Hours" is a subtle analogy to America's current economic issues....should we decide to cut off "the invisible hand" and prevent reckless risk-taking?

Rating: 9/10 (12 December 2010)

"127 Hours" is the true story of avid mountain climber Aron Ralston (James Franco - in the performance of a lifetime here), who decided to take a spontaneous hiking trip to Canyonlands National Park in Utah one Spring day in 2003 without taking a cell phone with him and without telling anyone where he was going. Unfortunately, while hiking through a canyon well below the ground surface a boulder fell down on Ralston's right forearm, therefore trapping himself in that location. Ralston was forced to survive on one full water bottle and one day's supply of food for 5 days - before he took the drastic and incredible measure of cutting off his own forearm to set himself free.
This movie is all about the art of immersing the audience with Ralston and letting us experience his psyche during the slow-paced 5 days of hell he experienced, with little to no dialogue for most of the film. Franco's performance overall is simply spectacular, and deserving of the Oscar for Best Actor (even though he probably won't get it because of his young age). The numerous close-ups of his face with his bloodshot, droopy eyes, clenched teeth, and veins popped out of his neck and forehead can only make me imagine the hell director Danny Boyle put him through while filming this movie. Boyle and Franco never wuss out when it comes to showing us the dark sides of life in the hole, as they aren't afraid to let us see large ants (real) crawling on Franco's face or him almost drowning to death during a terrential downpour that almost fills up the entire canyon one night.
As Ralston, Franco shows us a character that always lived life to the extreme and could easily be described as cocky and arrogant. In the first 15 minutes of the film when he is beginning to explore the canyons, we see him arrogantly flirt with a couple of young female hikers, and later in the film during some flashbacks we see his partying lifestyle where he believed that he was basically immortal. Yet while this overconfidence and arrogance is likely the reason why he got himself trapped in his dilemma in the first place, ironically it could also be said that both of those traits gave him the emotional strength to keep fighting as the days passed by.
One would think that a film like this would be either extremely depressing to watch or extremely inspirational to watch, but I personally found it to be neither. I was simply so immersed in the canyon with Franco that I felt as though I was just focused on doing whatever it took to get through the days and nights, just as he was, and that I didn't have time to feel a lot of different emotions. He's neither someone you truly root for, nor someone you root against, mostly because you don't really know much about him - it's just all about the business and strategy of trying to figure out what to do in the moment to survive. Also, I was pleased that Danny Boyle basically focused the entire movie on Ralston's dilemma in the hole with some sporadic flashbacks of memories with his families and friends, rather than adding on some kind of extra subplot with a rescue recovery team trying to find him or his girlfriend consistently waiting on the couch to hear from him back home. We see a few short clips of Ralston imagining his girlfriend talking to him, but it's all seen from the perspective of his own psyche and mental state in the hole - rather than creating scenes from a typical search and rescue plot.
The film is also a very subtle analogy to America's economic meltdown in 2008, and Ralston serves as symbolism for that. Danny Boyle clearly means for people to think about this in the film, as he shows a guy in a store in the beginning for 10 seconds with a t-shirt that reads "You can't lay me off today." Ralston is of course an avid risk-taker who does everything he wants individually, regardless of thinking of any possibly dangerous consequences. He just takes any risk he wants in the outdoors, and never plans for anything to go wrong. It's pure individualism and risk-taking taken to the extreme. It's a very fitting comparison to our economic structure of unregulated capitalism and gambling in recent years, and how we allow individualism on Wall Street to take risks with our money on a daily basis, without any kind of "back up plan" in case of unintended consequences. We now see ourselves (not just the United States, but also much of the world) still struggling with the effects of our economic collapse. Perhaps we can learn from Ralston by making some changes so we have our own preventive back up plan and focus less on "all or nothing risk-taking" individualism so we don't have our own tragic accident like this again. Ralston clearly decides that he has had enough of it, as he makes the choice of cutting off "Adam Smith's invisible hand" (his hand was under the rock, so it was invisible to him), to set himself free. No more unregulated capitalism and reckless risk-taking and greed for Mr. Ralston - he has learned from his mistake.
It's a shame that a movie with great acting and directing like this has only made a mere 7 million dollars after already being in release for a month now, and that it has only been released in a select number of theaters nationwide. This is terrific art to watch being created on the screen and I sure hope it ends up making a solid profit on its 17 million dollar production budget. Hopefully the fact that Franco is now co-hosting The Oscars this year will call more attention to it and get it some name recognition.