Between a rock and a hard place

It’s sick, but I keep thinking Danny Boyle’s real-life story of Aron Ralston, 127 Hours, would make an excellent advertisement for the Swiss Army Knife. There’s one prominently shown in the opening scene, when Ralston gropes around in a closet shelf, yet fails to nab the all-in-one tool that’s just out of reach.

As he will learn later, that knife would have come in quite handy. So to speak.

Ralston (played by James Franco) is an engineer, amateur explorer and would-be travel guide who grew up near Colorado’s Canyonlands, an area of deep ravines and gorges that adventurers love to climb and spelunk. The 26-year-old found himself trapped in the bottom of one such ravine for five days back in 2003, his arm pinned by a fallen rock. What follows in Boyle’s gripping film is an examination of character, human nature and — most importantly — the need to leave notes and take a Swiss Army Knife with you wherever you go.

Aaron is a self-described “hard hero,” the kind of guy who takes off on his mountain bike on weekends without telling a soul where he’s going, attempting to test himself and brave the elements by canyoneering. That he knows Canyonlands like the back of his hand is immaterial, however; nature is an indifferent force, one that doesn’t care about how much you know, because it simply is.

Rock hard: Franco finds himself in a jam at the bottom of a ravine.

When he blithely traipses over a pile of rocks atop a deep ravine, the earth temporarily shifts — or at least the one rock he’s standing on does, causing him to fall some 30 feet down, his arm wedged in by an immovable object.

The film, which opens today, is immediately gut-wrenching, putting us in Aron’s shoes, showing us a finger that is already turning gray and blue from loss of circulation. One can imagine what comes next.

The rock itself becomes a character (though fortunately not like “Wilson,” the volley ball that Tom Hanks talks to in Cast Away): the chunk of million-year-old rock shows us how our bodies can become prisons. But for a few inches of squeezed flesh, Aron would be free. But like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 127 Hours also shows how freedom must first exist in the mind: Ralston displays remarkable calm, courage and resolve in embracing his choices.

Though cell phones were still in their infancy at the time, Aron is armed with a video camera (which he uses to dutifully record his ordeal, much as our YouTube generation now routinely does), a bottle of water, a few food rations and not much else. Oh, he does have a cheap, made-in-China, all-in-one knife/pliers/flashlight. But what he really needs is a Victorinox.

Rock on: Ralston meets a couple of female climbers and takes a few group shots in 127 Hours.

Warning: 127 Hours is quite graphic, depicting what a real human being might do if forced to choose between separating himself from an important appendage or dying of dehydration, starvation and exposure. It does not dance around the subject of this choice, and this is probably why the Oscar-nominated film is unlikely to win a Best Picture trophy: it’s not exactly the feel-good fare offered up by The King’s Speech.

But forget Colin Firth’s stammering for a moment; Franco gives a vivid, visceral performance as Ralston, an engineer by profession who must make do with the few items he has in order to survive. A film taking place almost entirely in a narrow rock gorge could get really boring, but Boyle, who struck gold with Slumdog Millionaire, never lets the narrative sag. For an older guy, he’s still full of ideas, visual inspiration and a youthful, zeitgeist-capturing style. The opening credits alone stand up there with his Trainspotting opening (he uses the same Jai Ho composer from Slumdog, A.R. Rahman). Boyle employs all kinds of tricks to keep us riveted to Ralston’s plight, including split-screen scenes, hallucinations and fantasies. There’s a hilarious, touching scene where Ralston pretends to be on a talk show, recording himself as host, guest and phone-in caller, probing his own mental state in the cave. The script itself is what helps us see inside Aron, and what causes a young man to want to challenge himself in a life-or-death battle against nature.

For five days, Ralston talks to his video camera, daydreams, hallucinates, drinks his own urine… then decides to survive.

In this, it recalls Into the Wild (more so the book than the Sean Penn-directed movie), which showed how young Chris McCandless got lost in the Alaskan wild, ate some poisonous mushrooms, and couldn’t summon the strength to wander out of the woods for help. The Jon Krakauer book ponders this “pioneering” obsession among young men, usually Americans, who feel a need to go “off the reservation” and try some experience that few others would hazard.

The implicit warning is that overconfidence is never a good thing to carry with you into the wild. Ralston is cocky, goofy, and self-centered. He’s all about filming himself, taking snapshots and videos of his adventures, editing his own life instead of exploring what makes him turn away from family, girlfriends and co-workers. Franco gives an anguished turn as someone who even edits his freakouts — when he inadvertently films himself screaming for help, panicking, he backs up the video and records over it. “Don’t lose it,” he keeps muttering to himself.

The audience, meanwhile, start to lose it. When the final denouement comes, most people in the audience I saw were squirming in their seats, even grown men covering their eyes (me included) as the cheap, made-in-China knife comes out and the inevitable takes place. And we were just watching it on a movie screen. Imagine what it must have been like in real life.

Aron Ralston is determined to remain rational in the face of almost-certain doom.

What really lifts 127 Hours beyond a simple adventure and rescue flick is its focus on character. Ralston tells his video camera at one point that “this rock has been waiting for me my whole life.” He comes to understand that every single decision he has made in life has led him to this situation: pinned down by a rock that’s millions of years old, not a metaphor but a reality, a reality with his name on it. It’s a great existential moment, not because it shows Ralston summoning the courage and pluck to lift himself to a superhuman level, as most Hollywood films might do, but because it reveals how helpless he really feels in the face of an implacable universe, how pinned down he is by his choices, by his need to not ask anyone for help. It’s a life-changing moment. At the very least, you’ll never go anywhere without your Swiss Army Knife again.