Hollywood

127 Hours of Hollywood Hokum

November 15, 2010

Multiple Pages
127 Hours of Hollywood Hokum

The exuberant 127 Hours, Director Danny Boyle’s first movie since winning the Best Picture Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, is surprisingly comparable to The Social Network.

While 127 Hours is shorter, slighter, and more upbeat, both films are deftly made reconstructions of famous 2003 events within young elite subcultures: Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg founding Facebook and alpinist Aron Ralston walking away from a solo canyoneering accident by amputating his own arm.

Both movies overcome their inherently static situations through showbiz razzmatazz. Aaron Sorkin enlivens a story of typing and giving depositions with snappy dialogue. Boyle employs flashbacks, hallucinations, alternative endings, and his zap-pow digital cinematography to juice up the tale of a man, his hand wedged to a canyon wall by a fallen boulder, contemplating his options. Namely, these options are: somehow survive in a crack in the Utah desert on a liter of water until somebody stumbles upon him; rig a pulley to lift the 800-pound rock; chip the boulder away; perform surgery on himself with a dull knife; or die.

In contrast to the frenetic Slumdog, Boyle offers viewers time to think along with his hero by spreading out Ralston’s discoveries of his options. In truth, Ralston, a mechanical engineer from Carnegie Mellon who’d quit Intel to concentrate on climbing, identified all his possibilities within an hour after his fall. Getting audiences to like the real Ralston’s combination of cold-blooded rationality and recklessness, however, is a more complicated challenge than Boyle chooses to accept.

“Both The Social Network and 127 Hours leave you wondering whether the middle-aged filmmakers, despite their undeniable expertise, truly understand their young subjects.”

(In case you are worrying, no, the hero doesn’t spend all 127 hours sawing off his arm. While that took Ralston an hour, Boyle compresses the auto-surgery down to a couple of minutes, with his camera mostly on James Franco’s expressive face.)

Both The Social Network and 127 Hours leave you wondering whether the middle-aged filmmakers, despite their undeniable expertise, truly understand their young subjects. For example, both films’ inspirations are more conventionally handsome than the movie stars who portray them. Franco (the kind-hearted dope dealer in Pineapple Express) looks weedy compared to the rugged-jawed Ralston. Boyle’s harsh digital colors and need to shoot with wide-angle lenses in the soundstage mockup of the four-foot-wide canyon slot leaves poor Franco looking pop-eyed and sallow.

These casting choices enable the filmmakers to manipulate audience reactions. The Social Network portrays Zuckerberg as a lonely, angry nerd, even though he strikes programmers and venture capitalists as a natural leader of men. Last week, for example, Google granted all its employees pay raises to keep them from defecting to Team Zuckerberg.

In contrast, the crinkly-eyed Franco makes Ralston seem a likeable slacker goof who merely forgot to tell his parents where he was going. Franco’s acting is fine, but he can’t overcome that he looks delicate, citified, indoorsy, friendly, and modest—all of which Ralston is not.

Rather than a plucky underdog, the real-life Ralston resembles a shorter version of basketball great Bill Walton, that exemplar of a post-1960s Western American archetype: the sportsman who combines trippy tastes (Walton followed the Grateful Dead, while Ralston, a generation younger, followed Phish) with a hunger for personal challenge and technical excellence that can be hard on the mere mortals around him. This engineer-hippie-daredevil combination included my old Scoutmaster, whom I helped carry on a stretcher out of the Sierras in 1971 after he slid 90 feet down a cliff while rock climbing.

A recent study found that climbers suffer posttraumatic stress disorder after severe injuries only one-seventh as much as soldiers and firemen do. (Indeed, three months later, my Scoutmaster backpacked six miles on his crutches.)

Ralston’s bestselling memoir, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, reveals him to be a more ambitious and polarizing figure than 127 Hours lets on. The film leaves out Ralston’s backstory: His springtime jaunt through Canyonlands National Park was only a vacation from his long-term project of becoming the first man ever to climb all of Colorado’s dozens of 14,000-foot peaks…solo…in winter—a goal so dangerous, it made him controversial even among mountaineers.

Mountain climbing has long attracted people of the highest competence, intelligence, and literacy (books by climbers are innumerable) who do things the rest of us find crazy. The first mountaineering legend, George Mallory, who died near Everest’s summit in 1924, was close to the Bloomsbury coterie. Mallory’s three-word explanation for why he climbed Everest—“Because it’s there”—fascinated and frustrated literary intellectuals for generations.

Boyle, however, isn’t interested in exploring any of the traditional climbing conundrums. He doesn’t even like nature much. “I’m not a wilderness person at all,” he explains. “I was riveted by it because I thought it was a victory for the city over the wilderness.”

127 Hours is a triumph for superficiality in the Man v. Mountain genre long addicted to Deep Thoughts.

SIGN UP
Daily updates with TM’s latest


Comments



The opinions of our commenters do not necessarily represent the opinions of Taki's Magazine or its contributors.