Tears in Telluride for 127 Hours

Twitter has been abuzz for a while now with breathless tweets about Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours — only one was slightly disappointed. The 24 Frames blog at the LA Times says many tears were shed:

In “127 Hours,” Boyle’s cameras (he used two cinematographers, Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak) never stop moving. They soar over the desolate Utah canyons where Ralston was stuck for all those hours. They swim through the water bottle as he drinks his last drink. They penetrate his arm, as Ralston’s knife stops when it hits bone. They enter a duffle bag that Ralston has put over his head to stay warm in the 44-degree chill, the bag’s nylon shell becoming a miniature movie screen in which Ralston briefly revisits the world he has left behind and might never see again.

Most directors would have cut away from Ralston to focus on the building rescue effort, but Boyle doesn’t. Franco is in virtually every second of the movie. As he becomes increasingly dehydrated, he starts to hallucinate, and it is after one such hallucinations—in which Ralston thinks he might be seeing a son who is not yet born—that Ralston decides to take dramatic action and cut himself out.

In making the movie, Boyle knew that if the audience averted its eyes when Ralston ultimately breaks the bones in his arm and severs a tangled mass of tendons, muscle and nerves with a dull knife, “127 Hours” would have failed. While one member of the Telluride audience apparently passed out during the graphic sequence, very few looked away. Ralston, who was attending the screening with his wife, was visibly moved throughout the film, but the tears really started flowing when he watched the reenactment of his primitive surgical procedure. The relief in the theater was palpable—if there’s such a thing as quiet cheering, there it was.