If Aron Ralston's name doesn't ring much of a bell for you anymore, no foul. Our overtad brains had to make room for Heidi Montag somehow, didn't they? All the same, nobody can say the dude's fifteen minutes of fame back in 2003 were unearned. Fond as she is of reshaping the Montag physique, not to mention the limelight, sawing off her right forearm to escape being pinned by a boulder while canyoneering is one bright idea that would never occur to Heidi.
What wouldn't have occurred to me was that Ralston's grueling six-day boy-meets-rock ordeal would end up providing the story for one of 2010's best movies, let alone one overseen by exuberant Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle. But 127 Hours brims with his rowdy love of life in unexpected ways. Starring James Franco, the thing went over like a tsunami at this year's Toronto film festival, where Slumdog's ball of wax got rolling. And no wonder, because your average I-will-survive docudrama it definitely ain't.
Boyle doesn't cheat the material by padding it with Ralston's backstory. Or even, more forgivably, following him on his later media treks from Good Morning America to Letterman and back, which might have been interesting but a very different movie. Instead, all we get by way of prelude is the cheerful beginning of Ralston's canyon trek. That includes his frisky encounter with the two people who, if things had worked out differently, would have been the last to see him alive—Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn as a merry pair of fellow hikers he briefly hooks up with, wangling an invite to a fun-sounding kegger before they all go their separate ways.
The tumble that traps him happens so soon afterward that he hopes they're still within earshot, but they aren't. From then on, which means for most of the ninety-five-minute running time, we're alone with Franco in a crevasse so narrow that direct sunlight only warms him for a precious quarter hour or so each morning. That's if he stretches out one foot for the full spa effect, anyhow.
We watch him think up and try to ecute one failed plan after another to either budge the damn boulder or extricate his arm. Since the real Ralston had enough hipster in him to tape a daily camcorder diary of his experience, we eavesdrop on his monologues, slapstick routines—he's got to keep himself entertained, after all—and farewells to his family. Like him, we get fixated on his peculiar world's details, which are few but, under the circumstances, excruciatingly relevant, from how much water he's got left before he resorts to drinking his own urine to whether his toes can reach the spot where he's just dropped his all-purpose tool. Even the spasmodic memories and fantasies that get visualized for our benefit flash on and off too quickly to function as reprieves.
What you may not believe is that 127 Hours is not only spellbinding from start to finish but weirdly celebratory. Maybe we can't help goggling at the stomach-churning version of ingenuity that finally got Ralston free, but in a way the hero's eventual survival is almost beside the movie's point. The real drama is how he hangs on to his inventive, goofball individuality while facing an unbelievably lonely and senseless death, and Boyle—whose Irish roots do have a way of letting him channel Samuel Beckett along with blarney—plainly prizes that for its own sake, irrespective of the outcome. But if you still aren't sure why this is one movie you've just gotta see, James Franco's name must not ring much of a bell for you, either.
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My guess is it does, though. In a faintly mysterious way—that is, without too many noticeable squeaks and farts from the hype machine—Franco has turned out to be the stealth star of our time: the guy whose approach to acting is most in tune with postmillennial sensibilities, making whatever he does next interesting just because he's the one doing it. At 32, he doesn't quite qualify for membership in the post–9/11 generation, but that's the vibe his eclecticism gives off anyway. From his connection to the Apatow gang to his nonchalance in tackling parts most agents would warn him off with a shotgun, his unplanned-looking career has done a better job of playing hopscotch with our collective mood than, say, Jake Gyllenhaal's overstrategized one.
Franco's anticareerism is almost certainly balderdash masking some pretty high-octane artistic ambitions, but he fakes it awfully well. Even though his rep as an egghead—the English department's loss was the big screen's gain, and so on—mostly tells you the competition isn't exactly overcrowded, it takes enormous likability for an actor to advertise his intellectual curiosities without being accused of posing. Even case-hardened media cynics would rather hear a good story about him than a bad one.
Just like everybody else, though, we mistook him for a pretty face at first. You don't get cast as James Dean otherwise, but while playing James Dean is usually a guarantee you'll never be James Dean, Franco managed to dodge that pitfall. Once his three stints as Tobey Maguire's sidekick in the Spider-Man franchise gave him the latitude to mess around, he made his Heath Ledger move, opting for projects that piqued him as an actor—the wayward impulse that 127 Hours crowns—instead of more gravy. The difference is that Ledger probably wouldn't have been piqued by Pineapple Express, but Franco's instincts aren't as slapdash as they look. What made him sublimely funny in that movie was that he was the only performer who didn't seem to come equipped with his own laugh track.
His supporting role in Milk the same year was brought off with such ease that the choice didn't even seem nervy, but it was. It was one thing for Sean Penn—an Oscar-certified big star whose insatiable mug is practically the dictionary illo next to "heterosexual"—to impersonate gay activist Harvey Milk, but quite another for Franco, whose persona both on-screen and off was nowhere near as established, to play the less robust part of Milk's lover. Then he went gay again as Allen Ginsberg in Howl this fall, and although the movie was a botch, Franco's performance was ideally right. The heartbreaker was how much more he could have done with the part if the script had only let him.
Since he spends most of 127 Hours alone on the screen in dire straits, you might think it's tour de force showcase time. But that's the impulse Franco always plays against, just as he'd always rather play against his looks. Compared to the clenched intensity we can imagine Penn bringing to every second of playing Aron Ralston—our Sean does have his Kirk Douglas side, you know?—Franco's intuition that Ralston's comic curiosity about his plight is a coping mechanism is a thing of beauty.
When the movie's Ralston treats his quandary as a puzzle, you know even he probably doesn't think any of his contrivances will work. He's just keeping his wits occupied so he won't go nuts and start gibbering. The one time he does yield to hysteria, he quickly warns himself not to lose it—and the memorability of that moment is all in the warning's banality. Since he also knows his own stupidity is to blame for his likely demise, self-pity isn't on the menu. His conversations with himself play out like a stoner version of Krapp's Last Tape, and you're only stopped from calling Ralston the part Franco was born to play by the fact that—from Ginsberg to Pineapple Express's dazed pot dealer—most of 'em seem that way.
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The rest is all Boyle. If the novel challenge of keeping our attention concentrated on the specifics of Ralston's excruciatingly constricted environment without monotony gets the filmmaker's juices flowing in one way, he takes full advantage of the fantasy inserts and other breakaway bits to show off his pop flair. While I'd bet anything some fogies will object to the intrusions of visual razzle-dazzle, they'll be missing the point if they do. These mash-ups are the visual syntax of Ralston's generation, and in a sense he's picturing commercials for the world he's left behind.
Boyle may be 55, but what makes him the right director for 127 Hours is that he's in love with postmillennial youth: their humor, their improvisational resourcefulness in unlikely predicaments, their camaraderie. That's why the preliminary sequence when Ralston encounters the two female hikers is so vital. When he introduces them to one of the canyon's secrets—a grotto you have to splash down into by letting go of a crevasse's walls—all three of them know it's kind of a sexy situation, and yet none of them wants to sexualize it; their easy-come-easy-go bonding matters more. That's not the way things worked in Boyle's day, and he's as smitten as a Bedouin seeing his first dolphins. Later, when Ralston rewatches their frolics on his camcorder, the poignancy isn't just the freeze-framed girls. It's all that water, so abundant you can swim in it.
In case you sense a generational metaphor in not only that image but the movie's overall trajectory—from heedless plenty to trapped despair to self-mutilating salvation—trust Boyle to be ahead of you. On the surface, 127 Hours is far removed from Slumdog Millionaire's festiveness, but it's not as unlikely a sequel to Slumdog as it might appear to be. Though he never cops to it explicitly, which would be deadly, Boyle's taste for pop parables has led him to frame Ralston's freakish odyssey as something no other filmmaker would have been likely to recognize it could be. Namely, an uncannily evocative post–9/11 coming-of-age story.
If twentysomethings end up taking this movie to heart, odds are that won't be because it's the smartest dramatization of a real-life ordeal since Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn. They'll flock to it because it's their story, too—one they can identify with, even if the only canyon they've ever seen is Wall Street. Or so this member of the gamy generation that screwed up their lives suspects, anyway. Sorry about the boulder, kids, and good luck getting out.