Kristin Reviews 127 Hours

Once, during a brainstorming session, Steve threw out a premise that consisted of a few characters trapped in a small space for the duration of the movie. My response was “What would they do during the second act? Their interaction with each other would have to be pretty fascinating to keep the audience in their seats.” The idea was shelved.

Danny Boyle managed to keep an audience in their seats by trapping one guy in a small space for the duration of a movie.

127 Hours is a masterpiece in filmmaking, and I honestly can’t think of many writer/directors who could have pulled it off. In fact, if I were to make a list of “most difficult screenwriting feats,” it would end up looking a lot like a description of Boyle’s brilliantly executed tale of a daredevil outdoorsman who winds up trapped in a canyon for, yup – you guessed it, 127 hours, with no chance of rescue and little chance of survival. One guy. One objective. No human opposition – just a boulder, a canyon wall, and 127 hours of intense desperation, loneliness, despair, and gradual phsychological unraveling.

One of the hardest things to do when writing a screenplay is to show (not tell) what is going on in a character’s mind. In a novel, a character’s thoughts can be as clear (or muddy) as the author wishes them to be. One of the reasons so few adaptations of Stephen King novels succeed is the screenwriter’s inability to capture on film the cognitive aspect of terror or madness or resilience that King so deftly describes in prose. A screenwriter is limited to a few options:

• Voice-Over: a character speaks over the action as a disimbodied voice. When used correctly, this technique can be quite effective, for example, The Opposite of Sex and American Beauty. Often, however, lazy screenwriters simply use voice-overs to avoid coming up with a more creative way to share a character’s thoughts with the audience. I am most annoyed when these writers start a movie with voice-over narration and then forget about it half-way through, creating an unbalanced, inconsistent final product (and yes, I’ll be bringing this up when I review Animal Kingdom later)
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: a character actually speaks to the audience as if he can see it sitting there. This technique is used rarely, and I am always impressed when a writer pulls it off. My favorite example is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
• Greek Chorus: yes, well, Woody Allen used a Greek Chorus in Mighty Aphrodite, but it annoyed a lot of people. Not a common or recommended technique.
• Character Interaction: this would be the most common technique. Give a character someone to talk to, and the audience can learn all manner of things about what’s going on in his head through what he says (and, perhaps more importantly, what he doesn’t say). Watch almost any movie, and you’ll find that you learn most of what you know about the characters from the way in which they interract with other characters. That’s just how movies work . . .

. . . so, if you have a character trapped alone in a canyon, and you’re not going to use voice-over narration or break the fourth wall (neither of which is used in 127 Hours), you’d better have a pretty darned brilliant plan to keep the audience engaged and connected to your main character.

In the interest of spoiler-avoidance, I won’t go into detail here, but I must say, Danny Boyle uses several techniques to invite the audience into main character, Aron Ralston’s, deteriorating state of mind, all of which are chillingly effective. By the time the climactic scene arrives, the audience has joined Ralston in panic, exhaustion, desperation, resignation . . . thirst, hunger, and pain. Thanks to Boyle’s creative use of music, editing, and camera work, and James Franco’s inspired performance, 127 Hours is not a movie about a guy who does the unthinkable to survive; it’s a movie about facing inner truths, acknowledging mortality, and finding hope in the tiniest of things.

It is too bad many potential audience members will be scared away by the promise of gruesome elements, because 127 Hours is, without question, one of the best films of the year. I have no doubt it will receive one of those 10 Best Picture spots, and I would be surprised if it does not get nominated for Adapted Screenplay, Directing, Editing, Sound Editing and Mixing, Score, and Actor.

-Kristin
2.10.2011