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Apr 15, 2011 Web Exclusive By Jim Scott

The Best Picture nomination was nice, but was hopefully a product of the ridiculous ten nomination policy and not anyone thinking 127 Hours was actually Best Picture material. It’s a good movie—a surprisingly good one considering the level of difficulty involved in portraying a man who is hiking and has his arm crushed by a boulder as a motion picture. Emphasis on the motion. Because what director Danny Boyle faced was even more daunting than Robert Zemeckis in Cast Away, where there was a man on a deserted island, but at least he could move around and talk to a volleyball. Wilson the volleyball was the great fictive creation of Cast Away, and the not as great but just as useful creation in 127 Hours is the strange fascination climber Aron Ralston has with documenting his own exploits. James Franco is excellent as Ralston, and he makes talking to himself via his video camera seem plausible and in the end, necessary for his survival. Anything less would have made 127 Hours a terribly painful experience.

Instead, the film’s downfall is its incredible heavy-handedness, where we are told time and time again that Ralston’s problem is his own self-reliance. This is the dark side of Thoreau, though it’s doubtful Thoreau ever rode a mountain bike over boulders while listening to his iPod. Of course, one can be fairly sure that a newfound need for human contact was what Ralston took away from the experience, but Boyle has never been a subtle director, and the outsized message gives him an equally outsized hammer with which to batter the audience.

Despite these complaints, 127 Hours has several moments where the pure visceral thrill or the sheer emotional shock is palpable enough that one forgets its shortcomings. The small screen diminishes these thrills proportionately, but the additional features are a reminder that Aron Ralston is a real person who went through this amazing ordeal, and that Boyle came as close as possible to capturing his trials, despite the story’s seeming limitations for film. (www.foxsearchlight.com/127hours)

Author rating: 7/10