127 HOURS

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If you read a paper or saw the TV news in 2003, you already know this story and you probably know how it ends.  If not, you’d best not read on, because I have to discuss the story’s resolution.

 

This film, based on Aron Ralston’s autobiography, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, begins with a montage of hectic city life, of crowds buzzing around neon-lit city streets and of Ralston, looking haunted and pale, escaping from it all into wilderness where he can come back to life and ride his mountain bike across … mountains.  He is the kind of guy who likes living on the edge and prefers his own company and the wilderness.  The wilderness du jour is Blue John Canyon in Utah which is, frankly, exquisite enough that no one could blame him for wanting to be there.  However, Ralston is also the kind of guy who likes to ignore the beaten path and clamber around parts of the canyon that no one else visits which is, of course, how he gets himself into trouble.

To be fair, he comes across as something of a self-important, arrogant prick.  But, maybe this confidence, this self-belief, is what carries him through the ordeal he is about to experience.  He accidentally slips into a narrow crevasse, pulls a rock down on himself and ends up wedged, with his arm crushed.  Showing remarkable presence of mind, the cool, logical engineer in him very quickly comes to the fore and he applies himself dispassionately to the matter at hand (sorry).  He is disciplined with his water and imaginative with his problem-solving, as he, initially, sets about patiently chipping away at the rock to free his arm.

To spend so much time alone on camera, running through such a spectrum of emotions is a dream role for James Franco, it’s the sort of role for which any leading man would give his right arm (sorry, sorry).  There is the better part of an hour at the heart of the film when it is just him, his motivation and his internal monologue. Coming off the back of Milk (2009), where he played Harvey Milk's partner, Scott, and the as-yet-unreleased-in-the-UK Howl (2010), where he played Allen Ginsberg, Franco has quickly built himself a reputation as a serious actor and an expert at playing real people.

Like last year’s similarly-themed Buried, this film is shot in unflattering, penetrating, distorting close-up.  We get so close to Ralston we can actually see inside his head, to him remembering tender moments with his dad and regretting not answering the phone to his mum and fantasising about student parties with that certain girl.  Gradually he realises that people actually are important to him!

Director Danny Boyle’s usual DP, Anthony Dod Mantle is present and correct, ably abetted by a newcomer to the Boyle posse - Enrique Chediak.   There is, as yet, no explanation of how the two cinematographers broke down the workload, but I imagine one of them may have worked on the hallucinations, leaving the other to do the real-world stuff.

Boyle proved himself a master of the cinematic hallucination with Trainspotting (1996) and he employs these skills repeatedly throughout 127 Hours as Ralston’s starvation and dehydration send his mind wandering into juxtaposed split-screen montages.

The film is certainly as visually audacious and energetic as we have come to expect from Boyle.  Ralston has a video camera with him, which he uses to make video diaries and, ultimately, record what he believes will be his last will and testament.  Boyle’s DP’s invest the film with the crude intimacy of held-held, home-made videos, to emphasise the verisimilitude of this true story.

What could be a remorselessly grim film is enlivened by a very welcome vein of humour, especially when he is talking directly to his camera and imagines himself appearing on a chat-show which, let’s be honest, we’ve all done on occasion, even when not pinned under a boulder and facing almost certain death.   

Much of this material is taken from the videos the real Ralston recorded, extracts from which can be viewed as part of this documentary.  Looking at them, you appreciate just how accurate the movie adaptation of the real event is!

If I have any criticism of the film, it is that the hallucinations make their point, then re-make it, then re-remake it.  Yes, we know he has regrets.  Yes, we know he wants to see his family and that girl again.  We also know how this story ends and, after the one hour of screen-time that stands for the 127 hours he endured, we really are ready for the moment we have been awaiting anxiously.

Ralston’s will to survive is extraordinary (even if it does fall short of Bear Gryll’s obsession with eating live insects) as is his presence of mind throughout the ordeal.  He even finds the poetry in his surroundings and finds time to enjoy watching the sun-rise! 

Finally, having reached the point where he has nothing to lose, Ralston makes the decision which saves his life, a decision which, frankly, I feel few of us would make in his stead.  And, even if we did, would we have the strength to go through with the horror and the unimaginable pain of it?  He decides that, yes, finally, he must use the cheap, all-but-blunt multi-tool that has been taunting him for five long days and cut off his own arm. 

Then, without warning, he deliberately breaks both bones in his arm.  This is a shocking moment for which I was not prepared.  But this sickening start to the proceedings, which you know is inevitable, is not the worst of it.  There is one literally nerve-wracking moment which uses sound brilliantly and which will live with you long after you’ve left the cinema. 

The camera doesn’t dwell, doesn’t relish, but neither does it shy away from Franco’s incredibly convincing performance.  Handled differently this could have become parody but, as it is, you believe it completely, you are caught up completely in super-human endurance and imperviousness to pain and, only afterward, do you remember that it felt true because it is true! 

Having read up on the real Ralston since seeing the film, I can admire the way he has lived his life since (even if the damn fool does still go climbing mountains) and this has increased my regard for the film but, as a standalone viewing experience, I found it to be a minor addition to Boyle’s CV.  I don’t know if this is because I am comparing it to Buried which surprised and delighted me in roughly equal measure.  127 Hours certainly has its moments and a stunning central performance but, ultimately, the fireworks of Boyle’s hectic and eclectic visual style try too hard to compensate for the perforce stationary nature of the story. 

Maybe he should have gone the route Kevin (brother to Boyle’s ex-producer, Andrew) MacDonald chose for Touching The Void (2003), which tells a similar tale of unfathomable human endurance, but intercuts it with interview footage from the real people, helping you to get into their mindset without the need for a palette of visual tricks.

Maybe you should watch the two films as a double-bill and make up your own mind!

Dir: Danny Boyle

Star: James Franco, Kate Mara, Treat Williams, Kate Burton

Dur: 94 mins

Cert: 15

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

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Here, on the eve of its Academy Award shoot-out with Benjamin Button, I feel I ought to put down my thoughts on Slumdog Millionaire the, if you will, Oscar underdog.

The first thing that is worth noting is that the ad campaigns which have touted this as “the feel-good film of the year” are shamelessly failing to prepare you for the shocking cruelty and tragedy you will see in the film’s first half. If you walk in expecting this to be another Millions (2004), you're in for a steep learning-curve but, by the same token, if you go in expecting something as stark and edgy as Trainspotting (1996) you, again, will be surprised because Slumdog Millionaire manages to bridge the apparent chasm between both those films. It isn't scared of staring into the abyss of human weakness, like Trainspotting did but, like Millions, it also never loses its faith in the tenacity and raw humanity of children.

In typical style, director Danny Boyle doesn’t make things easy for himself as he weaves together no fewer than three narrative strands, cutting backwards and forwards between them in a way that could, in lazier hands, be very confusing.

The three stories are: The childhood of our hero, Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar / Tanay Chheda), an infant scavenging on the mountainous rubbish tips of the city then known as Bombay. Fast forward about fifteen years to modern-day Mumbai and the second strand, where we have the grown Jamal (Dev Patel) sitting in the hot-seat in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The third strand then takes place during the night after the Millionaire recording, where Jamal is being tortured by the police because they think he has somehow cheated on the show.

The way these three threads are drawn together, informing and supporting each other throughout the film, making a ferociously complex structure clear, dramatic and deeply moving, is an admirable example of good construction, a job of work achieved initially by Simon Beaufoy’s unflinching script and then by Boyle and his editor, Chris Dickens, who has rightly been nominated for one of the film's Oscars.

The game-show is the key to this structure as every question Jamal is asked sparks off a memory flashback to a key incident in his life, which tells us his story and tells him the answer. This framing technique really is a thing of beauty and lifts this film far above the mere travelogue/life story the film could have been. In my (not especially) humble opinion, it is, like the editing, entirely worthy of the Oscar nomination it received and, if Beaufoy doesn’t take the statue home, he can consider himself robbed!

I can’t sing the praises of the script highly enough, but I think I’ve made my point, so I’ll move on.

The flashback scenes show us a life that we, in The West, cannot easily (or willingly) imagine existing in our modern world. If this film does nothing else, it shines a light into the dark and ignored corners of the world that we, in our own comfortable, privileged little corner, prefer not to think about but, rather than dogmatically pounding us about the head with the injustice of it all, Boyle’s style and pace gives these scenes a vibrancy and aesthetic which is almost ecstatic. Saturated in turmeric yellows and cayenne reds, Slumdog is very (one suspects, deliberately) reminiscent of Cidade de Deus / City of God (2002), since that film deals with a very similar world of corrugated shacks, rank squalor and casual brutality.

The performances of the children in these heart-breaking early scenes are a revelation. One is lost in awe of them and fear for them as we see their big, trusting eyes looking out at a world where they are completely alone and where a human life has no value whatsoever. Quite how Boyle managed to get such consistent and convincing acting from pre-school children, who don’t speak English (when he, presumably, doesn’t speak Hindi), is just one of the many secret treasures buried in this film. In fairly short-order, we see these children orphaned, then gathered up by the Fagin-like crime-lords who operate gangs of beggars. But, far from the avuncular image we may have in our minds of Ron Moody or, now, Rowan Atkinson, these loathsome parasites deliberately maim the children, because this elicits greater sympathy from the tourists, and therefore more money.

Jamal and his brother, Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail / Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala), make their escape, unscathed, and begin fending for themselves, surviving on their considerable wits. In this, the film also reminds me of the harrowing anime Hotaru no Haka / Grave of the Fireflies (1988) but, here, the children’s stoicism in the face of unremitting brutality stops the film from tipping over into maudlin sentimentality or high tragedy. One wonders if this would be the case if an American director had made it.

At one point, after we’ve been lulled into a deceptive sense of security by watching the boys, now about ten or twelve years old and fluent in English, enjoying themselves by harmlessly hoodwinking the cow-eyed American tourists flocking round the Taj Mahal; Jamal is caught by an Indian taxi-driver and savagely beaten in front of the tourists. Picking himself up, he wipes the blood from his face, turns to the Americans and informs them: “You wanted to see the real India, well, here it is!”

These early scenes very much reflect the way that a lot of Western eyes (and all Western films that I can think of) see India, as a vast, incomprehensible and frightening beast; but, as the boys travel from infanthood through their teens to eventual adulthood, so the film travels in style and content from this out-dated Westernised image to a more contemporary, better-informed, more Eastern perspective.

This is where the casting of Anil Kapoor as the game-show question-master, Prem Kumar, is a master-stroke. His performance will be seen very differently by the two audiences this film will attract – the Western and the Eastern. For us in The West we see him as merely an increasingly arrogant, sarcastic and conniving egotist, but for those familiar with his Bollywood work, this performance will be all the braver and more powerful, rich with the echoes of Amitabh Bachach, Kapoor’s Bollywood contemporary, who used to host the real Indian Millionaire show, Kaun Banega Crorepati and who is referred to early on in the film in the notorious toilet scene.

He and the show he hosts and the vision of Mumbai it represents, demonstrate how far India has come even in Jamal’s short life-time. As an adult, he works in a call centre and, in one significant moment, he stands with his brother, dozens of floors up in an unfinished sky-scraper, looking down at the other buildings rising from the land which had, a few short years before, been the rubbish-tip of their birth. As the country has crawled out of The Dark Ages into the light and prosperity of Modernity, so the innocence of Jamal and Salim falls away, but not the love that runs just beneath the surface of this film, finally to break through in these latter scenes.

The transformation from Western perspective to Eastern continues, with the film adopting more and more Bollywood motifs. As the colour palette shifts from the warm rural colours to colder urban greys and blues – and white – the film becomes a love-conquers-all tale, where the brothers war over the heart and soul of the girl, Latika (Rubiana Ali / Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar / Freida Pinto), who had stolen Jamal’s heart when he was too young to know he even had one. Mix in some obvious Gangster Movie tropes, involving Salim transforming into a Tony Montana clone, and you have all the ingredients you need for a traditional Indian melodrama.

These latter scenes, shot through with the miasma of textures, colours and perspectives that we have come to expect from Boyle and his Cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, are designed, I feel, to show Hollywood, that it doesn’t own the copyright on the big, universal themes like love, loyalty and trust which drive we poor, fragile human beings, even in moments of extremis.

The conclusion of Slumdog is pure schmaltz, with an explosion of joy, movement and music that finally, stamps the Bollywood hallmark on the film so you can emerge from the cinema and back into your life with a grin and a skip in your step and only, after, will the memories of those eye-opening early scenes leak through, serving to make the joyous achievement of the film’s dénouement all the more emotional, and all the more impressive.

So, composure regained, do I think this film will win the ten Oscars for which it has been nominated? The short answer is … no. I don't think it'll get the Best Film award, or Doyle the Best Director because, as I mentioned earlier, Slumdog Millionaire eschews sentimentality until the very end, also because it is set in an almost completely alien world and, ultimately, because it has no big name (American) stars. I think Slumdog should and will win some significant statues for its craft and technical virtuosity but, if it comes down to a straight decision between this film and the no-less impressive Benjamin Button, I suspect the latter will win the big categories because it is a more conventional, more American tale, and history suggests that American Academy members favour American stories.

Still, as I type this, I'll know for sure in about twenty-four hours.

If Slumdog does lose the big statues to Benjamin, I feel this would still be an honourable result. I am convinced that Slumdog will take home the less-prestigious-but-no-less-important behind-the-scenes awards and that would, I feel, be the best of both worlds: East and West.
POST-AWARDS ADDENDUM:
And so, as the slumdog immigrant workers in their high-vis jackets are pushing brooms down the wrinkled, heel-scuffed red carpets and the millionaires are heading-home after the high-vis parties in the hotels and night-clubs all across town ... The 81st Academy Awards are now about twelve hours in the past and, it turns out, I was wrong. I underestimated the Academy members. This wasn't a protective, patriotic Awards at all. I confess I'm surprised that Benjamin Button ONLY won for its make-up and effects (and art direction) ... But not as surprised as I am that Mickey Rourke won't be taking a statue back home to his Chihuahuas. Just goes to show ... even after twenty-five years of watching Oscars, I still can't tell which way things'll go. Sometimes the Should Wins and the Will Wins are the same thing ... and that's when cinema wins!
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Directed by: Danny Boyle
Written by: Simon Beaufoy
Starring: Dev Patel, Madhur Mittal, Freida Pinto, Anil Kapoor
Dur: 120 mins
Cert: 15
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image © Celador Films / Film Four
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