127 Hours

Everyone who goes to see 127 Hours knows that the central character is going to cut his arm off with a dull blade right? Well, I certainly knew that this film would be chronicling the 127 hours Aron Ralston spent with his arm lodged between a canyon wall and a boulder and the steps he took to free himself.  I bring this up because it was impossible for me to watch this film without that knowledge affecting my viewing.  I sat eyes glued to the screen with nervous anticipation for its duration, awaiting "the scene."

Aron Ralston, hiking-enthusiast-adventure-junkie-extroardinairre, wakes up, takes a shower, ignores his mother's incoming phone call, finds the equipment necessary for a day of hiking (minus his swiss army knife), and leaves town with a few photocopied pages of a hiking guide - alone.  It's pretty clear from his off-roading trek into his start point and his almost dance-like movements over the desert topography that he knows this place intimately, a second home.  So when he meets two women hiking through, attempting to figure out what direction they need to go, it is only fitting that he offer to guide them and show them the hidden beauty of his home.  He takes them on an adventure, shuffling through a canyon wall only slightly wider than their bodies, suspended in air with their hands and feet pushed against the wall in front of them.  Ralston pulls his hands and feet away from the canyon wall and drops into the unknown.  Awaiting him a few dozen feet down is a refreshing pool, an oasis in the middle of desert.  The girls remain suspended, deciding whether to fully trust their crazy adventure guide and experience the same rush and refreshment Ralston offers.  They drop and Ralston gets the praise for showing them the heart of the desert - a place they would have never found on their own.

This is who Ralston is.  He is the one who takes lost people and sets them straight.  He is the one with the knowledge, the insight, the right moves. 

He ends up leaving the women and they head off in different directions back to the points from which they started.  Weaving in and out of small crevices, testing the strength of the ground he walks on, pausing to look ahead for unstable rock, one knows all his knowledge will not save him from what is to come.  The boulder he stands on gives way, his footing is lost and that same boulder he once stood on has pinned his arm against the canyon wall. 

The remainder of the film is the story of Ralston's will to survive.  With only a rope, a flashlight, a dull knife, a Nalgen full of water and a muffin, the situation looks grim.  We see his regret for refusing to pick up his mother's phone call that would have provided at least one person with his location. We see his attempts at making pulleys, shaving off bits of rock, anything to get that boulder to move a few centimeters.  Then comes hopelessness, an understanding of his horrific situation and hallucinations of past experiences.  He is experiencing ten minutes of sunlight a day and forty degree nights.  His fingers have turned grey, mostly certainly dead by this point.  With a rescue near impossible and no chance of moving on his own, we see Ralston survive by drinking his own urine and keeping his spirit alive by roleplaying on his videocamera.  The dull blade sits on top of the rock and it's coming.  The knife too dull to cut through bone forces Ralston to break his arm twice.  He then stabs his arm as deep as he can, cutting through muscle, tendon, and wincing at the cut of every nerve. His arm from the elbow down remains lodged between the canyon wall but he is now free to stumble out of the cave into sunlight, eventually encountering two groups of hikers who are able to help him until a helicopter arrives.

I have now heard a lot of people say that anyone in Ralston's situation would have done the same thing.  They argue that the will to live gives one the power to do anything to make that happen, that this is inherent human nature.  I would like to believe that with a lack of water, sleep, and the experience of hallucinations egging me on, I too would be able to sever my arm in order to live. I just don't think I could. Maybe the type of person who has it in him to cut his arm is the type of person who goes hiking in the middle of nowhere by himself with no one knowing.  I'm not that type of person either.

Anyway, Danny Boyle directed a beautiful film for more reasons than the prinstine landscape he was able to capture.  The way the days roll into each other, the blur of relationships attached to the thought of experiences that would never be given a chance to exist, the cringe of pain from the cutting of each nerve as the viewer is invinted directly into Ralston's arm.  James Franco nails the spirit of a lone ranger - a man too busy on a quest for adventure to be bothered with precautionary measures, a man who believes himself to be the precautionary measure for the random lost hiker.  The emotional journey he travels through regret, hopelessness, fear, humility, courage, relief is conveyed believably the whole way through. His eventual Oscar nomination will be deserved for playing a man at the high of his life to the very lowest in a mere 127 hours time.