In director Danny Boyle’s 1996 breakout hit Trainspotting, “choose life” was something of a sardonic call to arms—some of the other things viewers are exhorted to choose during the famous opening narration include leisure wear and dental insurance. The fact that the speech was given by a heroin addict (Ewan McGregor, in his own breakout role) during a foot chase only added an extra bit of wry piquancy. But Boyle had more in mind than a short-lived hipsterism; by the end of his film, the early sneering is scrubbed away, replaced by a hard-won adulthood.
It proved to be a pattern with Boyle, whose films since then—including the under-seen Millions and the Oscar megahit Slumdog Millionaire—have managed to deal with the messy process of maturing in ways that seem surprisingly fresh, if only because he rarely resorts to the kind of cheap emotional shortcuts we’ve all grown so used to in films. Add to that a distinctively punchy visual style, seen to great effect in Slumdog and the post-apocalyptic thriller 28 Days Later, and a Boyle film becomes something even more different: a grown-up art movie about something usually relegated to cartoon fantasy: the act of transformation.
In 127 Hours, opening Wednesday, Nov. 24 at Amherst Cinema, Boyle’s old call to arms is sung again, this time with never the trace of a sneer. This is the true story of Aron Ralston (James Franco), an engineer and mountain climber who spent a week in 2003 trapped in an isolated canyon in Utah, his right forearm pinned beneath a fallen boulder. Having told no one of his hiking plans, Ralston was so sure of his imminent death that he videotaped his presumed last words and carved the date of his expected demise into the canyon wall.
Instead, a delirious and dehydrated Ralston—he had resorted to drinking his own urine—did the unimaginable: using a cheap multi-tool, he amputated his own arm. Amazingly, he survived not only the improvised surgery, but also the navigation of a 65-foot cliff and a subsequent eight-mile hike out of the canyon. Today he’s a new dad, and is back climbing mountains.
The heart of the film is in Ralston himself rather than in his predicament: during his entrapment, he looks back on his life, recalling friends and family, fellow hikers and former lovers. Not long ago I wrote about the quietly intelligent acting of James Franco, and the pairing of this actor and director—one so natural it’s a surprise to find they haven’t worked together before—promises a special kind of story, one that takes an almost supernatural situation and makes it profoundly human.
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Also this week: Sean Penn, famously left-leaning in an already liberal town, continues to beat the drum in the Doug Liman-directed film Fair Game, where he plays Joe Wilson, husband of CIA agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts). Adapted from her best-selling memoir, it tells the story of the Bush administration scandal that not only exposed her identity to the world but also threatened the lives of those who worked for her overseas. Wilson, who wrote a scathing op-ed in The New York Times that criticized the administration’s run-up to the Iraq war, believes that his wife’s status in the CIA was deliberately leaked as an act of revenge.
Liman, who directed The Bourne Identity, here focuses more on the backdoor machinations of politicians instead of the field work, perhaps to his detriment: one review on popular film site imdb.com is titled “This movie sucked (and I’m liberal).” Decide for yourself when it opens on Friday.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
