127 Hours

It will likely remain one of the year’s most curious cinematic perplexities that a story of a lone man trapped in an eerily quiet place and situation ends up being one of the loudest movies in quite some time. Both aurally and metaphorically, 127 Hours is absolutely deafening. To tell the story of solo adventurer Aron Ralston, whose famous 2003 tale of survival at the bottom of a cramped canyon ended with him chopping off his own arm, director Danny Boyle has summoned one powerful force (lead actor James Franco, utterly captivating in the role) and then drowned that force under the weight of an overbearing amount of irritating, obnoxious noise.

Joining Boyle in his quest to turn this harrowing story into some sort of spastic music video that heralds the joys of a failing attention span are screenwriter Simon Beaufoy and composer A.R. Rahman. This trio is mainly to blame for this fiasco, while Franco can claim the majority of credit for the handful of moments that work. In these brief moments when the movie settles down, Franco entertains and amazes with his stationery one-man show as he stages an impromptu talk show performance and cracks amusing jokes to no one but himself.

The one exception to the “Franco is the only thing worth praising here” rule is the unshakable scene that everyone in the audience knows is coming. When Aron eventually admits that there is no other way out and then proceeds to break his bones and rip through his own flesh, the movie goes to a place that is so gruesomely effective that I cannot help but marvel at its mastery. It’s the one time that the noise works in context and the scene’s impact is partially achieved through some of the most realistic gore makeup I have ever seen. At no point does the sequence feel easy, accessible, simple, or remotely artificial.

But everything outside that sequence suffers from the heavy hands of Boyle, Beaufoy, and Rahman, who have created an intoxicated (I’m guessing it’s meant to be intoxicating) mish-mash of booming music and narrative shortcuts. In the opening moments of the movie, when Aron is first preparing for his weekend trek, the unbridled music and rapid-fire speed of the shots and cuts actually makes a bit of sense. The idea is that this is how Aron lives his life, on the edge with earphones planted deep and a desire to keep moving in whatever direction he is facing.

This loud, brash approach is acceptable in these early moments, but once Aron falls down into the shallow canyon where a rogue boulder pins his arm and threatens his very existence, Boyle’s flashy vision quickly becomes an annoying distraction. Rahman’s score threatens the audience’s eardrums with blaring sounds that kill the potential for claustrophobic fear and Beaufoy’s screenplay travels down a clichéd path of pointless flashbacks that are nothing more than filler.

Obviously, one man who can barely move while trapped between two towering slabs of rock doesn’t allow for a lot to happen onscreen, so the decision to expand the narrative canvas through sounds and visualized memories isn’t exactly a surprise. But Franco’s performance is strong enough to carry the movie on its own, so all this vociferous time-wasting caused by Rahman’s noise, Beaufoy’s restructuring, and Boyle’s overwhelming impatience does the terrifying tale a great disservice. It also means that Franco’s performance is never as inescapably all-encompassing as it deserves to be.

Some of the most shameless and ultimately pointless narrative excesses arrive in the form of increasingly ridiculous and unsubtle flashbacks that fail in their attempt to strengthen our connection to Aron as a character. These scenes hint at family relations now somewhat fractured and a romance with a young woman who eventually foreshadows Aron’s predicament by presciently (and blatantly) telling him that he’s destined to be alone. Just in case you miss one or two of these moments/images, Boyle and company make sure to repeat them throughout the movie, allowing the sentimental factor enabled by the flashbacks to take furious hold in the movie’s final act.

I can only take so many shots of what is supposed to be a young version of Aron staring back at a dazed and psychologically slipping adult Aron, who continually plays the memories over and over again in his head. When you add Rahman’s intrusive score to these shots, the effect is further muted as Boyle tries desperately to squeeze every ounce of blood, sweat, and sap from Aron’s death-defying experience. It seems as though Boyle just wants to ensure that the disturbing and later life-affirming nature of the narrative is not lost, but Franco’s strong performance should be left alone to do the majority of the heavy lifting, instead of being clobbered by affectations.

Every step of the way, Boyle makes it clear that he wants to expand the boundaries of his movie beyond the confines of the canyon that threatens to swallow Aron whole. It’s a stylistic storytelling decision that I cannot help but feel signals an irrational fear of inciting boredom. Franco’s performance is the key here, battling for attention and occasionally winning, but too often beaten down by the clamorous, self-conscious approach made so completely obvious by Boyle, Rahman, and Beaufoy.

127 Hours just never knows quite when to settle down (outside of the climactic amputation scene, of course) and the movie ends up more headache-inducing than heart-wrenching. It’s a shame that Franco’s performance isn’t showcased in a better movie where the focus can be solely on his very human struggle to survive. Instead, we have here the frantic, feverish version that is too busy locating distractions to truly do Franco’s performance justice. The actual story is powerful, but the movie is an irritant that inspires in me only the struggle to locate the mute button and put an end to the insufferable noise.