127 Hours

The true story of hiker Aron Ralston—who in 2003 found himself pinned by a rock and after five days carved his arm off to survive—boasts enough triumph for a crowd-pleasing movie. Actually filming it is another matter. How do you convey the passage of time? Can you confine yourself to a single space? Boyle, whose Slumdog Millionaire ran to the opposite aesthetic extreme, mostly dodges those questions. Consciously shot in the idiom of a sports ad, the movie offers little sense of the dread that must have built as Ralston (Franco, smug as ever) realized he wasn’t going to escape so easily. Fantasy sequences abound: Aron’s imagination lifts us back to his truck for hydration and revisits a painful memory of his ex (Poésy). It makes the film dynamic, sure—but it also mutes the impact of what made the story movie-worthy to begin with.

I’m in the minority. When 127 Hours played at Toronto, a colleague suggested I’d confused the film I’d wanted with the one I’d actually seen. After a second viewing, I’d agree to some extent—Boyle is more interested in Ralston’s fairly banal personal-growth story than he is in replicating the physical reality of his ordeal (although the talk-show sequence entertainingly bridges both)—but it’s hard not to pine for a less glib version of this material. The opening title card is the best-timed of the year, and the amputation is uncompromisingly vivid. Still, it’s perverse that a film about a man who can’t move would be matched with a director who won’t sit still.