Eliminating the Sieve

Rating: 8/10 (29 April 2011)

Occasionally someone will make a huge misstep and get loads of time to dwell on it. Aron Ralston, the hero of the ninth feature film by the skillful, vitalizing Irish director Danny Boyle, has one of those. He goes hiking in the rough country without telling anyone where he's going, and then in a cavernous, constricted crevice, gets his forearm ensnared between a boulder and the canyon wall. What would you do? I'm not sure if I could've done what he does. It entails a grisly test for Aron, and for us. It's not always easy watching him do it. Yet, as always, from such traumatic roots, it's quite awe-inspiring what a compelling and gratifying film Danny Boyle has made out of it.
As gut-wrenching as it is genuinely moving, this flashy, rousing but ultimately intimate and inspiring adventure docudrama fuses one of Boyle's most stunningly lively directorial efforts with an excellent performance from James Franco. For the bulk he contends with one approximately 10-foot-radius space, and one actor. There's a happy-go-lucky preamble in which Aron and a pair of young trekkers have a swim in an underwater cave. Later, in figments of the imagination, other people and pared-down events from his life appear to pop in.
The film heroes who involve me most are not loud. They don't swagger to a beat, make lugubrious moral proclamations and restore faith in the inherent good of the world. They're common people confronted with a necessity and face their predicament. Indeed, Boyle interestingly enough refers to as his version of The Wrestler in regards to creating the portrait of an existentially desperate protagonist. Franco does first-rate work signifying the two necessary features of Ralston's character. He's a brash, overconfident traveler who trusts his dexterity and loves skating on thin ice, and, contrarily though it'd seem, he's got horse sense and animal instinct enough to do inconceivable but necessary things to himself to survive. One characteristic finds his predicament, and the other solves it.
The question is, Can you take it? It's absolutely gripping. Films like this are neither fast-paced nor leisurely. They feel largely like they're all one moment. They exploit our profound nightmare of being confined somewhere and finding that there doesn't appear to be any means of escaping. Aaron is at any rate opportune to be standing on a stable footing. One can imagine the boulder lodging a little higher, leaving him suspended from the ensnared arm.
Abruptly, his world has become very clear. There's the crevice, the sliver of sky above, traversed by an eagle on its recurring flight path, his camcorder, decreasing water and food and his insufficient little utensil. Who can hear him shout? The two girls have long since made tracks and won't realize he's missing. For anyone to happen to discover him is unimaginable. He'll die or act.
Equal parts food for thought and triumph of the spirit, 127 Hours is a task in overcoming the unfilmable. Boyle employs superb cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, determining the immensity of the Utah wilds, and the extremely particular minutiae of Ralston's trivial ration of it. His editor, Jon Harris, accomplishes the subtle mission of showing his crucial act of bodily harm exclusive of ever totally showing it. For us, the nastiest moment is not an image but a blood-curdling, stomach-turning sound. Most of us have never heard this sound before, although we know precisely what it is.
Torture and violence are so everyday in the movies. They're seldom amplified to the degree of true medical reality. We and the characters feel impervious. 127 Hours eliminates the sieve. It connects us. One aspect that cinema can indicate but can't induce is the violence of the grief concerned. I can't conceive of what Aaron endures. Possibly, that made it simpler for the real Ralston, because no matter how, his choice controlled the length of his misery.
Boyle's stylized, claustrophobic drama warily doesn't make him a hero, more of a skilled sportsperson caught by a transitory determination. He could've easily been the guy in the adventure films whose bones and tattered clothes Hollywood characters find long after. He does what he must, which makes the film so gratifying. We could do it, too. The choice is in our blood, which chooses to go on.