127 HOURS movie review

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127 Hours (2010)–***1/2

I remember when Cast Away was released, wondering if Tom Hanks could keep an audience enthralled–with no costars–for two hours. The answer, of course, was yes and he did it with nothing more than his personality. Hanks can pull off such a feat for no other reason than he is Tom Hanks, a movie star in the most classical sense. His charisma and natural whimsy, whether in a TV interview or as a FedEx exec trapped on a deserted island, invite you to sit back and enjoy the show.

Like Cast Away, much of the screen time in 127 Hours belongs to one man: James Franco. Franco plays the media-hyped hiker Aron Ralston, who notably cut off his own arm after it was pinned between a boulder and a rock wall. While Franco is many things, he is, to be sure, no Tom Hanks.

Franco belongs to a generation of actors who have more in common with the broody stars of the mid-1950s. (Franco even played James Dean in a TNT telefilm.) While he’s charismatic, it’s not in the same gregarious style of Hanks. How then can Franco sustain a film when his character is the primary focal point for most of the runtime? Well, he doesn’t have to.

As an actor, Franco owes a debt not to director Danny Boyle or cinematographers Enrique Chediak and Anthony Dod Mantle, but rather to the film’s sound engineers and composer A.R. Rahman. This crew, most of whom also injected energy into the ghettos of Mumbai in Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, here set the scene and test the audience’s limits more than the other members of the filmmaking team.

Whether it’s Ralston’s hand gliding across the canyon wall or bones snapping as Ralston breaks his own arm, the sounds of 127 Hours are the true stars. This isn’t uncommon for a Boyle film, with his kinetic auditory and visual style. But most of 127 Hours takes place in a single location with only one character, so even the scurry of an ant is at the forefront of the cinematic experience.

The visceral moments in the film, especially the amputation scene, are articulated aurally. Likewise, the film’s emotion is fueled by Rahman’s musical bombast. There’s even a musically-enhanced emotional release at the end of 127 Hours (courtesy of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós), much like we saw in Boyle’s Slumdog. What’s striking here is that the film’s crescendo is primarily, if not solely, driven by the music.

Why is the sound and musical composition so important? In truth, Aron Ralston’s near-death experience and the revelations that result from it aren’t that enlightening. It’s literally the stuff of motivational speaking tours and inspirational memoirs. (Ralston is a speakers’ circuit regular and the film is based on his 2004 book.) Dazed flashbacks to a life avoiding contact with family or not opening up to a lover provide a narrative arch. But compare 127 Hours to a film like Into the Wild or even the pop phenomenon Lost and you realize there’s little that an audience can take out of this survival tale.

If Franco gets a Best Actor nomination in January, know that it wasn’t the character or the story that made it happen. You can credit Boyle and company for making a film that challenged the viewer’s stamina. Endurance, after all, is the only shared experience that we have with Ralston. That I can still hear scenes from the film while writing this review is a testament to that.

127 Hours, directed by Danny Boyle and starring James Franco, is now playing in select cities.