REVIEW: 127 Hours (2)

TRUE GRIT

In the year 2003, director Kevin Macdonald made a thrilling and terrifying documentary called Touching The Void, about two British mountain climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who went to Peru to scale a peak in the Andes and ran into rough weather due to unprecedented snow storms. On their way down, Simpson fell and broke his leg. The film traces his struggle to battle extreme conditions and climb down the rest of the mountain with a broken leg! It's chilling to the bone and the ultimate celebration of  the human spirit.

Danny Boyle transforms a similar real-life situation into a more audacious feature film, 127 Hours, a rare cinematic experience with drama, suspense, horror, humour, action and special effects blended to perfection and complimented by spectacular cinematography, editing and music. All of it, without seeming overtly showy.

Boyle never loses sight of his hero, Aron Ralston (James Franco), a mechanical engineer who chucked his job at Intel in 2002 to pursue mountain climbing. The same year that Macdonald made his film, Ralston, an intelligent, cocky and athletic 28-year-old took off to the Blue John Canyon in Utah without informing anyone, in pursuit of a thrilling weekend. He met two young girls at the canyon, spent some time with them, but didn't tell them about his plans either.

Later the same morning, he fell into a crevice and a huge boulder came down after; his right hand got squeezed under the boulder and he was caught, literally, 'Between A Rock And A Hard Place', also the title of his subsequent autobiography. Ralston spent 127 hours, or five full days, in this position with little food and water at his disposal and a pointless Chinese-made pocket-knife, his handy cam, knapsack, torch and climbing rope for company.

Ralston's story isn't remarkable only because he finally cut off his right arm to dislodge the boulder and free himself (to Boyle's credit, the horror of it is more in our imagination than in his visuals), but because he kept his spirit and his scientific thinking alive through most of the ordeal, rather than give in to despair.

Boyle and Franco externalise this struggle in the most believable ways. Ralston talks into his handy-cam recording his thoughts and feelings over his last days in the hope that the tape will somehow make it back to his parents. He reminisces about his childhood and hallucinates about making love to a gorgeous girl in car packed with people with a snowstorm raging outside. His desperate need for water creates another memorable moment of a 'virtual' deluge taking him off and depositing him to his car parked 17 miles away. And since it's Boyle and the subject actually warrants it, there's even a 'toilet' moment with Ralston peeing into his CamelBak knowing well that he'll soon run out of water.

Franco's performance is visceral and deeply moving. It isn't difficult to make Ralston likable (his cockiness and foolhardy decision to inform no one about his trip notwithstanding), but to make the audience feel for his fate and suffer with him required an actor-director team to use all the devices at their disposal to draw them into that narrow, claustrophobic, cold and dark pass somewhere under millions of years old rock formations, and actually look up at the sky to spot the rare raven or an occasional aircraft full of people passing thousands of feet overhead. 

Rarely does a film feel so close to one's skin that you're relieved it's all over -- even when you already know what's going to happen in the end. 

127 Hours is the film for which Danny Boyle and A R Rahman truly deserve those golden trophies. Let's just say they got them a year ahead of schedule.