DVD OF THE WEEK: 127 Hours

James Franco took the stage at the Kodak Theater with an iPhone, which he used to tweet his way through the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday night. (Two people taped him additionally.) Jokes about apps were made. Franco had only joined Twitter on February 20, but now he was taking the Oscars to a whole other uncomfortable level of hyper-technological referentiality, documented on every single platform available. The ever self-aware multi-hyphenate actor/writer/performance artist—the most successful self-aggrandizer since Vincent Gallo's rise—piled on the ironies by being nominated for a role in a film about a man who thinks technology will save him. It doesn't.

Danny Boyle may well be one of the most overrated big-name directors working today, constantly cutting between anything and everything like a frenetic coke fiend unaware of context. And yet, 127 Hours is easily his most rewarding movie since 2004's undervalued Millions, which was a genuinely sweet movie about urchins getting in over their head after lucking into a big pile of stolen cash. Part of what made Millions so adorable was the way it gestured toward the larger world by inviting the audience to donate money for water wells in Africa, what the children dream of doing their money. A random event catalyzes awareness of the larger world, which happens again in the spelunking tragedy flick. As far as gory movies go, this is pretty heartwarming.

In its unbeatable one-line synoptic hook, 127 Hours is the ripped-from-the-headlines movie about Aron Ralston, the guy who went mountain climbing without telling anyone where he was going or when he would be back, got his arm tracked under a rock, and had to saw it off. The children of Millions had an excuse for their often staggeringly wrong interpretation of events (they think the money came from God initially); the hero of 127 Hours has much less justification for being an idiot when it comes to his personal safety or behaving carelessly to his family and loved ones.

The catalyst for personal redemption here comes from Nature, very much with a capital N. When Ralston first gets stuck, he fights with all his technological tools. Most notably, he records his entrapment in video diary segments that will be very familiar to anyone who's spent more than five minutes on YouTube. This is what Ralston did for real, and Boyle used the footage from his real ordeal—footage that, in reality, is locked up safely out of the public eye, but was made available for Franco and Boyle to study. When Ralston got into trouble, his first instinct was self-documentation, an understandable but dangerous instinct for anyone who's ever felt too plugged in.

The filmic Ralston thinks nature is a video game that can be synced up to the music in his headphones, but he learns how wrong he is. Boyle's unthinking hyperkineticism is a snug fit, both as problem-solving for a claustrophobic trap of a premise and as genuine thematic counterpoint. Ralston can squirm, vlog and shout, but he can't escape the unmediated reality around him. He doesn't answer his phone unless he feels like it, and he only starts communicating with others on his phone/video camera when it becomes clear no one's around. He's Mark Zuckerberg under a rock, only with last-minute self-awareness: he doesn't realize how much he disdains people until he realizes how badly he's treated them. As FourSquare might hiccup, he's the mayor of canyon introspection, an honor documented in real time.

Boyle's frantic over-direction both keeps things lively and mirrors his protagonist's technology addiction. One of the most fascinating things about the way Ralston sets out to Conquer Nature—something he did regularly and avidly—is that he didn't like to hear the ambient sounds around him. (The real Ralston is a big Phish fan, something Boyle thankfully keeps off the soundtrack.) He wanted to experience the native world on his own terms. Unlike the hiking duo of Gerry—who trudge through a world of meticulously layered wild sound—Ralston tried until the last possible second to put up a buffer between him and that environment, and utterly failed.

Yet like Gerry, 127 Hours regards nature as savage, pitiless and indifferently so. This is a smart, unsentimental attitude. That Boyle editorially dances around the hard realities makes sense: he undertook the movie as a challenge in the same spirit as Ralston's hikes. Whether Boyle realizes that his movie embodies the same combination of technological festishizing and reckless risk-taking that got Ralston into trouble is irrelevant. Franco live-tweeted the boring ceremony into oblivion, having failed to learn what his character did: if your situation sucks, your portable hotness won't save you.

Posted by ahillis at March 1, 2011 9:06 AM