He Needs Help: ‘127 Hours’ (2010)
Some of the most extraordinary stories are also the hardest to tell. You’d think it might be different: with a story strong enough, you just put one fact in front of the other and let the truth do its work. But what about if the facts are extravisual, the drama interior? What do you do then? It’s an old question, whose answers are always renewing themselves. The answers got renewed again in 2010, when Danny Boyle made 127 Hours, adapted from Aron Ralston’s memoir about the five days and six hours he spent stuck in Utah’s Blue John Canyon, and the unthinkable method by which he freed himself.
He’d been trapped in a crevasse when a boulder came tumbling from above, lodging against the canyon wall and pinning his arm there. Nobody knew where he was; he hadn’t told anybody. This is where his ethos of self-sufficiency and adventure had gotten him. Between a rock and a hard place. Ralston couldn’t resist titling his memoir that, but fortunately Hollywood (uncharacteristically) went with dire reality over glib entertainment for the film title. 127 Hours: so blandly clinical yet so painfully vivid.
But the question remains: How do you cinematically convey the kind of anguish that occurs within the privacy of one’s own prefrontal cortex? This is one of 127 Hours’ many great triumphs — all the ingenious ways in which it answers this hypothetical.
James Franco, responsible for every moment of acting in this movie that really matters, referred to his process as “an inside-out approach,” making the “experience feel authentic” by not “slavishly mimic[king] or imitat[ing] Aron’s every gesture, but instead talk[ing] to Aron as much as we could beforehand, but after that put[ting] ourselves in our own canyon and figur[ing] it out for ourselves.”
Their own canyon was a set constructed in an old warehouse. Those constructing it worked 18–20-hour days, according to Vanity Fair, and a 50-foot hole had to be cut into the warehouse’s second floor. The whole thing when finished rose 33 feet. To lend this set a realistic claustrophobia, Boyle insisted the walls be rendered impossible to move. Franco was, as an actor, himself trapped in a crevasse. “Only one frustrated hair or makeup artist could attend to the actor at a time,” reported Vanity Fair. “The tense cinematographers were severely limited in the way in which they could operate.”
Boyle had hired two DPs in order to get a variety of approach and technique when shooting this all-too-fixed setting. (This move also enabled Boyle and Franco to work longer days.) One of the DPs, Enrique Chediak, fancied the whole thing to be a little like Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1989): “He used ten different DPs but everything was unified.”
What Boyle and Chediak and the other cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, as well as co-screenwriter Simon Beaufoy managed to communicate wordlessly is downright uncanny. Ralston craves some Gatorade — like, really craves it. How to convey this kind of desperation compounded by hopelessness? If you’re Boyle and his team, you put the camera on a parched Franco, then let it travel, at speed, through canyon, dirt, brush, and rock, for miles all the way back to Ralston’s truck, where it stops to linger tauntingly on a sweating 32-ounce bottle of Orange Gatorade.
Then you put the camera back on Franco, performing a perfect pantomime of sorrowful deprivation.
In Between a Rock and a Hard Place, the Ralston memoir, there are two bottles, one liter each, and when he thinks about them sitting all alone in his truck, they represent to him much more than just unsatisfied thirst, but prefigure a theme that becomes prominent later in the movie.
Paid for with cash, they represent yet another missed opportunity to have made his location traceable to rescue authorities and loved ones.
“I’m fascinated by the idea of a man being trapped,” Boyle once said, referencing a previous movie idea he’d been working on, about a Beirut hostage chained to a radiator for five months. “The challenge is to see if the language of cinema can describe the experience of being trapped.”
127 Hours demonstrates that it most assuredly can. Look at Franco throw his body with great gusto at the boulder that has him trapped, only to see the boulder remain mute and implacable. As Ralston, Franco rages, and his rage seems real.
The filmmakers did their utmost to make the little things matter, be it the throb and thud of a tachycardic heart, the hiss of escaping decomposition gasses, or the disgust at having to drink one’s own urine. Boyle cheated a bit with the decomposition gasses, dramatizing Ralston’s self-inflicted slice with Franco’s violent stab to reduce the poisonous fumes from his body. This compensates for the missing details that Ralston is able to provide in his text: “[T]he rot has advanced more quickly than I had guessed. Though the smell is faint to my desensitized nose, it is abjectly unpleasant, the stench of a far-off carcass.”
When Ralston in the movie sips his own urine from the straw of his CamelBak, no enhancement seems necessary — and yet Boyle, to his credit, provides enhancement anyway, letting us see the piss travel slowly through the inside of what’s supposed to be the straw. Then we see Franco gag while he continues to drink the piss — to try to drink the piss — before it bubbles up in the straw from Ralston’s reluctance, and then Franco retreats from the straw as if struck, resorting to full-on sickness-coughing.
At this general phase of his entrapment, Ralston was dealing with much more than could ever meet the camera’s eye, grimly contemplating “what will kill me first — dehydration, hypothermia, a flash flood, toxins from my crushed hand, or the infection that is likely breeding in my arm at this very moment.”
Does he want to commit suicide? He does not, although he has entertained the thought, ultimately deciding that, “regardless of what I might go through, I don’t want to take my own life.” While contemplating his quickly diminishing inventory, a raven flies overhead. Ralston “seethe[s] with envy for the bird’s freedom.”
Boyle filmed the bird but not the envy. He couldn’t film that. But we can somehow still feel it.
In a 2014 episode of Orange is the New Black, prison warden Joe Caputo confronts one of his correctional officers, whom he’s recently caught fucking a female inmate.
“You ever see an image that sears itself into your brain?” he says to the officer. “Like that movie about the hiker guy, who cuts off his own arm with a Swiss Army Knife? Yeah: the sound, the tendons….Fuck! I wish I’d never watched that part….You know what tops that for me? You know what image I can’t unsee? It’s still stuck in there, flickering at least once a day, making me want to lose my lunch?”
“No, sir.”
“Your bare ass, Mendez. Your pimply, white ass, bouncing up and down between the brooms and the mops, ramming into that poor girl. A girl that you were supposed to protect! And keep safe! Your ass — it haunts me.”
Caputo’s right about the terror of the amputation sequence (though he’s wrong about the type of knife used; see caption below). It can be incredibly difficult to watch, even for those of us typically comfortable with gore on screen. Boyle was careful to maintain a solemn fidelity to Ralston’s actual experience in amputating his arm, a “series of plateaus of pain that he had to live through.”
As Ralston decides to go through with it, A.R. Rahman on the soundtrack plucks out something spare and foreboding. We watch Ralston break his own fucking arm — twice — to help with the amputation. After he’s managed to dig deep into his forearm meat, Rahman’s plucking music-strings meet Ralston “pluck[ing]” his nerve, as Ralston writes in his memoir, “like lifting a guitar string two inches off its frets, until it snaps, releasing a flood of pain.” Here, the dominant noise on the soundtrack is one of metallic dissonance, as Franco sells not only the howl but the slobbering, seething crying that follows.
Finally he’s freed, to our relief as well as Ralston’s. We’ve been through more than we reckoned on, but with a story like this, a little discomfort is necessary. “[Y]ou have to be honest about the story,” Boyle said at the time, “and not approach it thinking you mustn’t horrify people too much. The truth is that it took Aron forty-four minutes to cut his arm off. He didn’t hack at it like a madman; he did it with precision. You’ve got to show an element of that, but not in real time.”
We get more than an element of it, and throughout the ordeal, it remains implicit that escape equals freedom and freedom equals safety. The truth was much less convenient, of course, but the movie needs the amputation to serve as the dramatic culmination of Ralston’s ordeal. Yes, there was still the canyon’s labyrinth to negotiate, and a 65-foot cliff to repel down, and eight miles of terrain to hike — and Boyle shot a lot of this footage before deciding, wisely, to leave it for the disc’s special features — but including this stuff as anything other than a foregone challenge would have confused the movie’s climax.
So there he is at the end, on his delirious way to society and safety before he collapses into the dirt — “Help me! I need help!” — and some nearby tourists come running over to give it to him. The music swells at this admission of Ralston’s as if a kind of breakthrough has been reached. And it has been, although the breakthrough is not the fact of his rescue but of his admission of vulnerability.
That’s why the music soars with triumph at the moment Ralston finds himself in the dirt — because he has finally broken down and acknowledged, to himself most of all, that he can’t make it alone through the world. Boyle’s been priming this pump all movie long, beginning with an opening triptych that establishes the theme right off. About this touch, Boyle says on the commentary track, “We wanted to start with people, and end with people, so we used this triptych idea, so we could get as many images [as possible] of people — unrelated to him, people that he’ll never meet, people who’ll never know him….”
Because we never know who in our lives will end up mattering, which is another way of saying they all do, already and every day and all the time. Boyle keeps this theme humming along by constantly reminding us of the people and things in his life Ralton has taken for granted, calling them up in eerie waking dreams in which he remembers the fellowship of friends, family, and lovers. At the conclusion of one haunting reverie, he seems to be wondering how many calories are in his contact lens before putting it on his tongue and swallowing it. Thinking back to when he’d first put in that contact back at his apartment, he remembers it was after his shower, preparing for the weekend adventure. His mom was calling and he let it go to the machine.
This is what happens when you take the people in your life for granted. It’s a concept that (with all due respect to Home Alone) hadn’t received the cinematic treatment it deserves, until this movie came along and said that it’s okay to live a life of caprice and danger, as long as you observe the canyon-wide chasm that exists between being alone and being on your own.
