What I Watched - 127 Hours

The best word I can use to describe this movie is minute, and I mean that as in "tiny detail," not the measurement of time, although both would be appropriate.

I think by now everyone knows the story of ill-fated boulderer Aron Ralston.  In 2003, he was out in Bluejohn Canyon, Utah, when a boulder fell, smashing down on his right arm below the elbow.  He was trapped there for - you guessed it - 127 hours, before he was able to free himself by cutting off his own arm.  He originally told his story in the book Between a Rock and a Hard Place, published about a year and a half after his accident.

What's impressive about this movie, starring James Franco (who got a best actor Oscar nod for the role) as Aron, is how as the viewer you start to rejoice right along with Aron in the small details and successes.   Fairly early on, there's a scene in which he drops his pocket knife on the ground.  You know that he must succeed in retrieving it, since he eventually cuts off his arm.  But nonetheless, you get wrapped up in this tiny struggle.  Is he going to be able to get it back?  How does he reach it?  And somehow, you forget that the whole reason this matters is because his arm is trapped under a boulder, he's low on food and water, and he's hundreds of miles from anywhere!  For those moments, all that matters is whether he's going to be able to get his knife back.

And then when he does, the reality of his predicament - why having the knife was so important in the first place - comes crashing down again.

All these little details could be tedious, but the amazing thing is this: they're not.  Rather, it's like you're living the experience with him: every facial expression, emotion, and eventually hallucination. And Franco (despite his atrocious performance as host of this year's Oscar telecast) really makes this movie happen.  He is virtually the only actor in it, and there's no narrator.  His face tells you that he's concerned about how much water he has, but there's no voice over to tell you just how long that water will last.  You have to wait and see.

There are bit parts played by Kate Mara, Amber Tamblyn, and Clemence Poesy (who you probably know as Fleur Delacour in Harry Potter), but they're mostly there to play the foils to Aron's independent character, passing fancies for Aron to dream about in the freezing canyon.

Sure enough, it's Aron's stubborn refusal to rely on anyone else that got him into this mess, but it's also his self-reliance that gets him out.  He does what he has to do.  He engineers a rope hoist to try to lift the boulder off his arm.  He talks to himself through the video camera he brought along to document his trip.  He wraps himself in climbing rope to keep warm at night.  He carefully rations his water.  He makes a tourniquet.  And he does all of it with his left hand and his teeth.
 
The film was scored by A.R. Rahman - who also worked with Danny Boyle on the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire - and who likely did a lot of work with the sound editors here, to delightful effect.  I'm thinking specifically of the scene in which Aron finds the nerve in his arm.  (The actual amputation of the arm takes up only a few minutes of the movie, for all the fuss and bother it's caused.)  Every time Aron touches the nerve, the jolt of electric sound that blares out of the speakers shoots straight to your brain, just as you imagine the pain shoots straight to his.  It's very well done.

Bottom line: there is a bit of that trippy, pot-smoking, live-to-love-the-rocks, twenty-something, wild outdoorsman attitude, but it's a fabulous role for Franco and somehow an uplifting story.