127 Hours (**3/4)

A couple people I know didn’t want to see this because of the one scene. You probably know which one, especially if you remember the story of Aron Ralston (James Franco) from all the media coverage in the summer of 2003. Ralston wrote a book about his experience that director Danny Boyle has adapted with his Slumdog Millionaire collaborator, Simon Beaufoy. Boyle’s films are suffused with a sense of motion and dynamism, and that would seem to be at odds with the story of a guy who, for most of the length of the movie, has his arm pinned down by a large rock in a desolate canyon in Utah.

For the pre-pinned down segment, the whizzing cameras, split-screens, saturated colors and insistent score by A.R. Rahman (another Millionaire collaborator) make it seem like Boyle’s still filming Mumbai instead of a desert. When Ralston gets trapped, he’s left the motion and commotion of civilization. For days—see the title—Ralston tries one thing after another to get free. Unlike Ryan Reynolds in Buried, a straight thriller, we see Franco in flashback scenes, so there’s not quite the same sense of claustrophobia. The wispy flashbacks—in flickering light and shadows—and echoey voiceovers fill in sketchy biographical detail without really telling a story. The voices sound like those cheesy ones where a character in a thriller hears the past played back so the audience will remember key plot points. In other words, it’s more evocative of other movies than of Ralston’s internal experience.

I tend to like movies about characters alone, and I like Franco, but I didn’t love this movie. Ralston seems more interesting when he meets a couple of female hikers before he gets stuck. Yes, Ralston gets to contemplate his own demise, but his litany of regrets—which he commemorates on videotape—is pretty much the same sort of sorry-didn’t-pick-up-the-phone-mom stuff you or I might think about. And the way Boyle handles the scene following the escape seems all wrong to me, full of loud music and more split screens, as if we haven’t realized it’s a happy moment. It’s not all bad. What happened to Ralston was inherently compelling, as all the news coverage in 2003 showed. Boyle provides great visuals in showing how it happened, the predicament Ralston found himself in, and how he tried to escape. Only a little about the aftermath, unfortunately.

IMDB link

viewed 2/14/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/14/11