Of 127 Hours, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman says, “the darker it gets, the more enthralling it becomes.”
127 Hours is as gripping a tale of stranded ingenuity as Cast Away, as Aron works to save himself by adjusting to his new reality… And he keeps himself chipper by rambling a diary of his experience into a camcorder.
His words amount to a ruefully snarky monologue of fate from a member of a generation baptized in irony, and Franco, in a tour de force, uses those words to capture Aron’s ordeal from the outside in. With his toothy, slightly dazed beach-bum confidence, the actor takes us through the Five Stages of Survival: detachment, jokes, rage, revelation, and doing-what-you-gotta-do. He gets us rooting for his bluster under pressure.
Here, as in Trainspotting, Boyle proves a master of altered states. Once Aron realizes that he’s not getting (or going) anywhere, he begins to descend into fantasy (there’s a trippy montage of soft-drink ads when he’s thirsty). And what he comes to see, in a delirium of enlightenment, is that his trapped state is what he’s been running from his whole life. That boulder was waiting for him. 127 Hours offers a daunting challenge to a filmmaker: How do you rivet an audience when your protagonist can’t even move? The answer is that there’s an awesome freedom to Danny Boyle’s filmmaking. And freedom, too, is the theme of the movie. Aron may be pinned, but his soul gets unlocked, and when he finally faces up to what he has to do, he’s not just cutting off his trapped appendage. He’s cutting off the part of himself that was only pretending to be alive. 127 Hours is a salute to do-it-yourself existential bravery, and an ingeniously crafted one, but what makes it cathartic is that it’s about a guy who gets high by taking the ultimate plunge.
Most familiar to me from the pages Film Comment, Stephen Farber (writing from Telluride for in The Hollywood Reporter) lays out his understanding of the film’s deeper themes.
Boyle has demonstrated visual razzle dazzle and kinetic editing since his early films, ‚ÄúShallow Grave‚Äù and ‚ÄúTrainspotting.‚Äù Here the style is meant to mirror the energetic personality of the protagonist, an adrenaline junkie who savors adventure and shares his infectious enthusiasm with anyone he meets. He encounters two girls while hiking in Utah and immediately goads them into climbing across a steep ledge and diving into a crystal-blue lake. We share the rush that the characters feel, but we also feel a sense of impending danger. The clock stops when Aron leaves the girls and begins climbing down a canyon. Suddenly he dislodges a boulder that pins his arm and traps him. From here the film moves into a more interior mode, though it maintains energy by drifting in and out of Aron‚Äôs memories and fantasies….
The different moods that Aron experiences point to the deeper themes of the film. ‚Äú127 Hours‚Äù is a pointed, double-edged critique of masculinity. Aron was reckless enough to embark on this climbing expedition without telling anyone where he was going, and the film sees that his cocky, independent spirit gives him unusual survival skills. But that lone wolf mentality also puts him in deadly peril… his belated awareness of the inadequacy of the Wild West code of self-reliance that stunts so many men. Franco nails this key moment with rare emotional intensity.
