This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 23, 2010 - In films from "Trainspotting" (1996) to "Slumdog Millionaire" (2008), Danny Boyle has shown he's a gifted director with a talent for finding beauty in the gutter, an ability to make gritty and even gruesome material palatable.
I say that not entirely as a compliment - sometimes in Boyle's movies style so strongly overrides substance that some of the substance is lost. Some cinematic dishes, such as crippling heroin addiction and grinding childhood poverty, should be hard to swallow.
On the other hand, it's hard to avoid being seduced by Boyle's visual inventiveness and his narrative drive - "Slumdog Millionaire" sped along like a bullet train, and "Trainspotting" had a beguiling druggy rhythm.
Boyle's considerable visual and narrative skills are put to a severe test with "127 Hours," a movie that essentially has one character and one dramatic moment -- although that moment is a doozy. The result is a surprisingly appealing, thematically unpretentious movie, helped a great deal by the fact that the main character, canyoneer Aron Ralston, is played by James Franco.
In Franco's skilled portrayal, we see Ralston as a kind of high-IQ golden retriever, friendly and eager and hyperactive, plunging ahead almost blindly into the latest adventure or misadventure. It turns out that he has more to him than that.
By casting Franco, Boyle won half his battle to make people like a movie about a man who cuts off his right arm.
In "127 Hours," after a brief idyll in a Caribbean-blue mountain pool with a couple of young female hikers, Ralston is bouncing alone through Utah canyon country when he slips down a crevice. A falling rock pins his right arm near the elbow. He screams for help, but there is no one to hear. He tries to slip free, and he rigs up a crude pulley system to dislodge the rock. Nothing works.
The sun rises, briefly blinding him, and sets, leaving him shivering with cold. And it rises and sets again, and again. He drinks his water, and then drinks the urine that he saved in his empty water bottle. He hallucinates about his parents and about the girls he had met on the trail. Occasionally, he talks into the small video camera he brought with him.
We learn that Ralston is simultaneously carefree and resolute, bursting with energy but philosophically laid back. And, as the days pass and Ralston finally decides to free himself with what is essentially a penknife, we learn that he is smart, resourceful and brave. He plans the amputation with the care of a surgeon, using what he knows about human anatomy, and sets to it.
Unlike, say, "Into the Wild," the film never really moves from a question of survival to wider social concerns, but it tells the story of Aron Ralston well and mostly without frills. Occasionally, Boyle will get overly tricky with the camera - the view from inside a water bottle doesn't give us any information or insight that we need. But mostly - perhaps bravely - the director sticks to telling the story.
The actual amputation, while briefly horrific, is not exploited for cheap thrills. Boyle shows us how it was done fairly quickly. Using a kind of X-ray shot, he illustrates exactly what tendons and arteries and nerves are being cut, and then it's over.
In the end, "127 Hours" succeeds because it is, on the whole, told simply and well. It is beautifully acted by James Franco. The film is well worth seeing, although those seeking meaning beyond the basic story of human survival may be disappointed when they don't find it.
Opens Wednesday Nov. 24
Harper Barnes, an author, is the Beacon film critic.