127 Hours (2011)

Every second counts.

Strange to see films after hearing so much about them.

There seem to be two big questions with this film. One, could you do what Aron Ralston did? Two, can you bear to watch James Franco acting it out on screen?

According to Danny Boyle, the director, speaking to Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 5 live, with regard to the first question, most if not all of us would do what Ralston did; with regard to the second question, a few people have fainted or vomited or had to leave the cinema, some people kept their seats, but started humming, presumably to keep out the awful sounds.

My wife, Xanthe and I, occupied opposite extremes. Squeamish in such matters, Xanthe doubts she could do such a thing to herself, and watched and didn't watch scenes involving blood from behind her hands. By contrast, I suspect - pain permitting - that I could do what Ralston did. Mammals in traps have been known to bite their own paws off, at least according to popular legend. Although I flinched quite a bit during the worst of the onscreen ordeal, I was able to continue watching in entirety.

A third, perhaps more interesting question was raised by someone - I've forgotten who now - which is, assuming you could do what Ralston did, what would be the thing that compelled you to do it, i.e. what or who would you be doing it for? In the film, the answer to that is what arguably provides the character's dramatic story arc.

A fourth question, posed adroitly by Mark Kermode, is how do film-makers maintain audience interest over three or four reels of film where a lone character is trapped in a single confined location? And how do you get the protagonist to verbalise, believably, if there's nobody else around? Are you going to be forced to resort to voice-over internal monologue?

Kermode notes the parallel with the film Buried, in which the protagonist is trapped in a dark box underground, and in which the film-makers solve the problem of how to bring in other voices by including a mobile phone, which apparently works very well - haven't seen it yet myself.

In 127 Hours, Boyle solves the problem in several ways. One, there is a run-up to the confinement, in which other characters interact with Ralston. Two, Ralston has a digital video camera, and records himself, and even views past recordings. This really happened, though the content of his actual recordings has not been released to the public. This is a brilliant device, because it allows Ralston to speak aloud to camera in an authentic way, giving us access to what's happening in his head, to monitor his state of mind and hear his plans and hopes and fears. Three, Boyle sneakily inserts snippets of Ralston's internal imaginings, daydreams, night-dreams, and once the barriers of credibility have been lowered, increasingly, external hallucinations.

The other task faced by the film-makers, again well pointed out by Mark Kermode, is to keep the visual interest fresh during the periods of confinement, and Boyle does manage this very well. To an extent this is done in technical ways - varying camera angle and so on - but mostly it is achieved by having Ralston engaged in purposeful escape-driven activity, by making these small challenges easily understandable to the audience, and by engaging the audience in the suspense of the outcomes.

The whole outcome rests to a large extent on the performance of Franco, and he clearly does an excellent job, as one would expect from the strength of his performances in Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, where he had to go from callow best friend to psychotic revenge-driven villain, and did so admirably. If you're going to ask an audience to spend a couple of hours tete-a-tete with a character, you'd better make that character credible, and especially if he's an apparently self-obsessed testosterone-fuelled over-achiever, you'd better give him some sympathetic depths. The script and the actor do achieve this, in my opinion. Franco certainly has a credible physique for the role, and pulls off the daredevil stuff well, and the script provides sufficient under-the-surface back-story to give him a story arc with psychological challenges with which to change and grow.

• Rating: Full price
• When seen: 05 Feb 2011
• Where seen: Cinema
• More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia

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Amendments: Added writer tags: "Aron Ralston, Simon Beaufoy"; changed phrase "a self-obsessed macho testosterone-fuelled over-achiever" to "an apparently self-obsessed testosterone-fuelled over-achiever". Removed link to Wikipedia-sourced image. Added ranking image.