Harrowing tale of survival celebrates the triumph of the human spirit

I KNOW I am probably in a minority of one but, even if we took Danny Boyle’s intended message at face value, there was something rather sickening about the way he lauded the resilience of his subjects in Slumdog Millionaire. It tended to imply that there is something honourable about being downtrodden.

To my mind, that starry-eyed view of poverty appeals more to the Western middle classes rather than reflecting the true aspirations of the poor. But Boyle, it seems, can’t help returning, again and again, to material that’s heavy on physical pain, mental paranoia and personal treachery. Before Slumdog, Boyle was probably best known as the gutter visionary behind Trainspotting, which leapt into the toilet with a band of Edinburgh heroin addicts. Then there was human dismemberment in Shallow Grave, the dying of the sun in the sci-fi Sunshine, and fleshing-eating psycho-zombies in 28 Days Later. We were beginning to wonder if Danny Boyle didn’t like humankind very much.

In 127 Hours which I got to see at the weekend, however, Boyle has redeemed himself. He honours the appeal of solitude while at the same time rejoicing in the wonderful necessity of other people. Adapted fromBetween a Rock and a Hard Place, a memoir by Aron Ralston, the movie takes as its subject the five-day period when, following a freak calamity in a Utah canyon in 2003, a young climber’s right arm is pinned by a falling boulder. Starvation and dehydration loom even though the pain of the injury has subsided. Suddenly, his world has become very well-defined. There is the crevice. There is the slit of sky above, crossed by an eagle on its regular flight path. He screams for help, but who can hear? For anyone to happen to discover him is unthinkable. Having told no one exactly where he was going, he knew that if he were to survive, he would have to help himself. He will die if he doesn’t do something.

Ralston begins formulating clever systems of survival and, he hopes, mechanisms of freedom, all the while relating his dilemma into the video camera he’s brought along. It becomes an enthralling window into how we might behave as Ralston, played by James Franco, tries to think his way out of a cataclysm. The boulder falls about 20 minutes into 127 Hours. For more than an hour, Boyle keeps us at the foot of the canyon as Ralston attempts to free himself using an assortment of different pieces of tackle and the physical laws of leverage.

These first experiments in problem-solving intensify the suspense because, subconsciously, Boyle invites us to invest our own brain power into Ralston’s position. We’re right there next to him, pleading with him to harness up, strap in and save water. And yet, all the while, we know: it’s gonna get ugly. Ralston’s saving grace is his capacity to remain composed in these circumstances, even making a video blog of his predicament, including his joy at the warmth of the 15 minutes of sunlight he gets to enjoy every 24 hours. He attempts to use his camping knife to dig his arm out, a wearisome exercise that saps his strength to little effect. A series of pulleys to lift the rock off him doesn’t work either.

He conducts a pretend self-interview on a TV talk show as he video himself. “I’m in pretty deep doo-doo here,” he admits. He also understands that the TV interview requires self-criticism: “The big f*****g hard hero didn’t tell anyone where he was going? Didn’t tell anyone? Oops!”

In the middle of filming himself, he imagines he hears someone and his ineffective cries for help become hopeless yells of frustration. He then reviews his own outburst on the video camera and mumbles softly to himself: “Don’t lose it. Do not lose it.”

As an engineer and an expert climber, he well appreciates how much time he has and what will occur if he does nothing and simply waits for someone to find him. He comes to the realisation over the course of the five days that he will have to forfeit that limb, like a fox gnawing at its own trapped leg, if he is to have any chance of surviving. The crushed limb is already unusable and Ralston is rational in his decision-making process, a process that is even more excruciatingly painful because he must do the deed by breaking both the bones in his arm and rooting around the muscles, tendons and nerves with a blunt knife.

Knowledgeable enough about his own slim chances of survival, Ralston did what few of us can even imagine: he cuts off his own arm. Boyle is a true master of the tactile, the visceral. And the dismemberment is stunningly crafted. Sound, more than sight, does the trick. It’s a terrible moment. Yet, it’s also a scene we furtively want to see. In pornographic terms, it’s the money shot. The film is defined by that one gruesome act. The final decision to go for it is more disturbing than the gore in any horror film because you feel Ralston’s inner torment. By the time the scene comes, well, yes, it’s bloody.

YES, you will flinch as you imagine what it would be like to try and cut off your own arm with a puny blade. But it is a scene of colossal triumph and euphoria too. Everything you have experienced in the film has led to that moment. It’s overpowering, in every sense of the word. It’s brilliant.

The way Boyle puts this vivid piece of suspense together, the magnificent moment of blood isn’t just a testament to our survival instincts, it becomes a means of dichotomising the very essence of the human spirit. Boyle hangs the entire emotional drama on the hook of human friendship, and the notion that we are all but meaningless without the affirmative presence of others.

127 Hours has the universal appeal of making us ask ourselves, “What would I do in that predicament? How far would I be willing to go?” What mental and spiritual resources would we have to fall back on if we found ourselves in such a situation? Would each of us do anything we could to rejoin those who matter to us? That’s the question at the heart of 127 Hours.

Is the film watchable? Yes, compulsively so. Films like this don’t move quickly or slowly, they seem to take place all in the same moment. They prey on our own private terror of being trapped somewhere and understanding that there doesn’t seem to be any way to escape.

The film deliberately doesn’t turn Ralston into a hero, more of a talented athlete ensnared by a momentary decision. He severs off his arm because he has to. He was fortunate to succeed: one can well imagine a news story of his body being discovered long afterward, with his arm only partly cut through. He did what he had to do, which doesn’t make him a hero. We could do it, too. Oh, yes, we could.