If my arm got caught under a rock, I think I’d take a break from caring about a whole bunch of bullshit. Say, my month-end expenses and that Raptors 3-game winning streak that includes a W over the Celtics. 127 Hours opens with a split-screen sequence, images of frenetic crowds. Wall Street’ers waving sheets of paper. A baseball stadium section, the fans standing from their blue plastic chairs. On a Friday night, Aron Ralston is packing for a hiking trip to Blue Jack canyon, to get away from all that. He hasn’t told his boss, has skipped his mom’s phone calls, and has no tab-keeping girlfriend. He wants a weekend to be really alone. What he actually gets, when his arm gets wedged under a boulder, is a whole different type of soul-changing solitude.
And for this film to work, it needs to sell that soul-changing. A regular guy doesn’t break his arm in two places, doesn’t saw through skin and a thick white ribbon of nerve. Doesn’t do all that with a cheap army tool that “came free with a flashlight”. The film strips Aron down quite a bit. Simple memories play out in his mind, these flashbacks also serve to move the action from the 6-inches of space that confine Aron (it’s Hitchcock, right, who said give him a phone booth and a movie camera?). Aron thinks back to a night spent in the back of a station wagon. His naked ex-girlfriend running the back of her fingers along his chest. “What’s the combination?” she asks wanting to unlock him. He also thinks back to their break-up. She leaves him, her seat the only empty one at a sold-out Utah Jazz game. He’s a lonely man in a capacity crowd. Further back, we see a moment in his childhood. His sister plays the piano and he films it with an old-fashioned camcorder. His parents watch, amazed, as the recording plays on their as-old-fashioned TV. “Good work, sis,” Aron says, wistful. This isn’t the deepest of stuff, but it is effective asking us not to work too hard to believe this guy. Makes sense if you think of Umberto Eco’s review of Casablanca: “Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us.”
It would be a mistake, I think, to stretch Aron too much, to layer him too much.
Aron’s mind doesn’t go to Wittgenstein and Karl Popper in this situation. Who has time for that kind of fancy when your thumb has turned gray? Aron stays low, late-night TV and afternoon news style, with his memories and the people he loves. There’s a sequence where he interviews himself, audience applause on the soundtrack. He uses different voices, one stylized and tenor to represent the interviewer, one unchanged to represent the interviewee. Aron talks into his camcorder and records. Director Danny Boyle shoots the interviewer with the camcorder (grittier feel) then cuts back to his conventional camera when Aron answers. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” he asks himself. “I’m a hard hero,” he answers with regret at keeping people at arm’s length.
Christian (my brother) says he can’t yet take James Franco seriously. Franco, after all, is a very public guy with his experimental films, creative writing MFA, and cross-dressed magazine covers. There’s some difficulty in separating his transparent public self with his roles. But, he’s not George Clooney or Bill Murray who do what they do well and what they do well is be themselves on-screen. There’s a bit of Franco in every one of his roles except that it’s only a small piece. In 127 Hours, he gives most of himself over to the twitching, over-caffeinated adventurer at the beginning of the movie. It’s exciting to watch him transform. The filling panic as he kicks at his boulder. The sad scruff-covered smile when he almost resigns to his fate (“This boulder has been waiting for me my entire life”). The invigoration, despite missing an arm, when he finally comes across others, actual other people, hiking through the valley. What else is there to feel after the very real thought that he’d never see another person again. “You have to sit down and rest,” one of the distraught hikers says. “No, I have to keep moving,” Aron replies, his chin covered in his own blood.
Then there’s the arm cutting scene. You know, personally, I didn’t think it was that bad.
