127 Hours: Cute, but not too cute; horrific, but not too horrific

If you ever choose to follow my advice, please let it be now. Do not eat before seeing this film. (But see this film).

December 7, 2010; 12:00 PM • by Susan Howson

Danny Boyle’s much anticipated 127 Hours pins us to the screen much like its hero, Aron Ralston, is pinned between two rocks in the desert canyons of Utah. Actually, it really is a little like poor Aron’s real-life ordeal, in that we are stuck there, witnessing in extreme close-up the horrors of approaching starvation.

Yeah, yeah, our ordeal doesn’t involve five days of excruciating pain or amazingly gruesome feats of human endurance. I did, though, spend the climax of the film amazingly enduring my own gruesome nausea, and I look forward with pleasure to a film celebrating my strength.

I kid! I kid! I’m not trying to make fun of Aron. He did the incredible (albeit after making some stupid decisions), and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy did his story serious justice with a beautiful script that takes very little material and makes it into something entirely compelling. As Aron, the talented James Franco, brings us with the character through a range of emotions: arrogance, buoyancy, determination, regret, courage, and hope. They’re all there, and we feel them along with Aron, whose sunniness is so infectious that the sad times are that much more upsetting. I felt inspired, although I can’t say exactly what I felt inspired to do — certainly not hike around canyons or drink anything vaguely yellow in color in the near future.

But, as with Slumdog Millionaire, it was hard for me to buy into several of Boyle’s directing decisions. I know the guy is really into Bollywood (and who wouldn’t be? That stuff is 100% fun), but what happens in Bollywood should stay in Bollywood sometimes, and there are a whole lot of busy, almost cartoonishly dramatic elements that are creeping into Boyle’s films. Not that I blame him, exactly. Slumdog took home the whole enchilada at the Oscars, so why wouldn’t he incorporate a little of that glitzy feel-good style?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s a glimpse into American cinema’s future. I can think of worse things, but it is going to make things a little tougher to take seriously. For instance, the score by Bollywood composer extraordinaire, A. R. Rahman, is a little too frantic and tries a little too hard. And the dying Aron’s hallucinations cause a few eye rolls now and then. But Boyle’s transgressions into a colorful world of cheesiness aside, you’ll remember this film for a long time.

And not just because it’ll probably win a thousand Oscars.

And not just because parts of it will make you want to pass out.

Okay, maybe because of that last part.