As 127 Hours reached its roaring crescendo I sat in the cinema enveloped by a wave of curious disconnectedness. For the first time Danny Boyle's visual pyrotechnics were not doing anything for me. In fact it felt as if they were actually working against the film.127 Hours tells the true story of Aron Ralston, an extreme adventurer who falls down a ravine and gets his arm stuck under a boulder. For the next 5 days he struggles with hallucinations, a dwindling water supply and other hurdles as he psyches himself up for the inevitable, severing his arm to release himself.
I've long been a fan of Danny Boyle's work. He is an energetic and visually creative filmmaker. At times I have defended Boyle from his various critics especially as I enjoyed some of his lesser regarded works (I still stand by my opinion that A Life Less Ordinary is a profoundly entertaining and fresh take on the classic Capra-esque romantic fantasy). On paper 127 Hours seemed a perfect fit for such an inventive filmmaker. Of course Boyle would be able to find a cornucopia of interesting ways to cover such a tightly set story. So why was I left so cold by this experience?
Maybe the weight of expectation was too heavy? For months we had been hearing about this film literally knocking audiences out with its harrowing intensity. Stories of people fainting and vomiting from screening to screening have been constant. Is this type of PR good for a film? Maybe my own personal interest in extreme cinema had desensitized me to what actually is for most mainstream audiences quite a distressing experience? After all, there were a lot of stunned faces in the cinema as the credits rolled.
I can only judge 127 Hours through the prism of my own subjective experience though. While it is a very well-made film and I can certainly say it will be effective for most audiences, it simply didn't resonate with me. My own attempt to decipher this reaction has sadly led me to the conclusion that it was Boyle's direction which was solely responsible.
For me there are two important things that a director much achieve if he is to make an effectively gripping single-location film. The first thing is to effectively place the audience captive in the central location. We need to feel trapped with our protagonist. We must develop a knot of anxiety in our stomach as we sense the inevitable. We know what Ralston must do and we need to reach a point of desperation with him as he finally makes that agonizing decision. At no point in 127 Hours did I feel any of these sensations. Boyle's hyperactive technique keeps the film moving on a kinetic level but it ultimately distances the viewer more than anything.One moment for example has the camera fly up the crevice and through the desert before finally landing in Ralston's car on a bottle of Gatorade. This device effectively conveys a thought in Ralston's mind as he runs low on fluid but rather than subjectively placing us into his position this moment actually separates us from empathising with his predicament, making it feel almost like a video game. We smirk with ironic detachment at the thought of this bottle of drink, so close yet so far. Boyle cranks up the music again, continuing his weird montage set to a song entitled 'Lovely Day', before flashing images of soda commercials in an obvious attepmt to contrast Ralston's thirst with these identifiable images of cool hydration. Of course, up until this point all Boyle has done to stress how thirsty Ralston has become is show us shots of James Franco licking his cracked lips. Boyle's shortcomings are painfully evident as shows us these things but rarely affectively conveys these feelings to his audience.
Boyle desperately tries to place us into Ralston's headspace, even frequently cutting to a jarringly odd first person perspective but these constant shifts in tone simply serve to disconnect the viewer from his experience giving the spectator a strange, almost omniscient view of the situation. Despite frequent access inside Ralston's hallucinations, we are always watching someone experience these delusions rather than, through formal devices, directly experiencing them ourselves.
The second important thing that 127 Hours fails to do that is of primary importance in these types of films is convey a sense of temporality. For a film the chronicles the experience of a guy trapped under a boulder for 5+ days, Boyle is unable to impart this feeling of duration. The film moves so fast from moment to moment that we rarely feel like we too have been stuck in this dire place. Boyle is a populist filmmaker and this has never bothered me before. He wants to leave his audiences uplifted and this continues the trend he seemed to have started with Slumdog Millionare (although this trend can be tracked throughout his filmography, even to the 'happy' ending of Trainspotting). He will serve up reasonably intense drama but never so much as to lose the goodwill of his audience. After all, he wants to be liked. In 127 Hours this is a problem as he seems reluctant to slow things down and draw moments out. Boyle is afraid of boring his audience but if we are to experience this journey effectively then maybe we need to be bored. If we are to come to the realisation that cutting of our arm is the only way out then we need to be appropriately traumatized by the prior 90 minutes. We need to feel as if we too have been stuck down a crevice for over five days and for me this film simply did not achieve that.Even the now infamous climactic scene was all build-up and no payoff. Boyle teases the audience several times over the course of the film in an almost playfully sadistic way. Is he gonna do it now? No, just kidding, but be ready it is coming. This long build up by its very nature will have an inherent pay off for most audiences but those that manage to actually keep their eyes on the screen will realise that this final “traumatic” sequence is actually very brief and exceptionally tame. As the sequence began my partner buried her head in my arm unable to look but after 5 or 10 seconds she turned to the screen and watched realising it wasn't that bad after all. Boyle also cuts this sequence like a music video, building faster and faster to a crescendo of sound and image that actually estranges the viewer from the immediacy of what is happening. Imagine the same sequence played with no bombastic musical score but mere sound effects, a single take, wide-shot, lasting 2 or 3 minutes. Sure a mainstream audience would feel less elation when the deed was done but it would be a far more viscerally affecting moment.
With 127 Hours Danny Boyle has perfected his personal style of harrowing feel-good film. He is determined to place just enough trauma into his narratives so as to justify the feel-good endings but he is also very careful not to alienate mainstream audiences. Like I previously said, I have no issue with populist filmmaking but for this particular story, which is so geared towards the experience of empathy with a central character, I needed much more than what Boyle was willing to give. 127 Hours is a very well-made film but for once Danny Boyle's style clashed so strongly with his substance that it resulted in a work that left me cold and detached. I should've been rocked by this experience but instead the film ended, I left the cinema, ate some lunch and didn't think twice about it.TRIVIAL ADDENDUM
The most amusing thing about 127 Hours is the fact the Lizzy Caplan's scenes as Ralston's sister had been cut out of the film. Co-Writer Simon Beaufoy recently spoke of an entire final act that he and Boyle decided to cut from the film at the last moment after test screenings
“There’s a long scene with his mother in the hospital, there’s a long scene with the ex-girlfriend where she told him a few hard truths, there was a scene at his sister’s wedding, which he referenced in the movie.”
Caplan is an exciting new talent who is bound to break into features sooner or later after some great work on TV shows such as True Blood and Party Down. What is most ironic here though is that her character on Party Down was a struggling acting working in a catering company to make ends meet. A subplot of the show's second (and final) season was her character getting a small part in a Judd Apatow film which promised to be her big break. Sadly her character was cut at the last minute from this fictional Apatow film thus stripping her the chance of appearing in a big feature film. Seems like life imitating art as the only sign of Caplan left in 127 Hours is a shot of her in a wedding dress on a couch during one of Ralston's hallucinations.
