Drum Media reviews: 127 HOURS and HOW DO YOU KNOW

127 HOURS

This is the kind of tough-sell project that feels natural for Danny Boyle to tackle after his Slumdog Millionaire cleaned up at the box office and won a bajillion academy awards. As the film’s baffling trailer works overtime to conceal, 127 Hours details the gruelling 2003 true story of Aaron Ralston (James Franco), an Xtreme sports bro who finds his arm trapped under a massive boulder during a mountaineering accident. With his phone left at home, he is left to his own devices – literally – to find his own way to freedom and write his inspirational autobiography (A Rock and Hard Place, which the film is based on).

The greatest strength of Boyle’s treatment of this minimal story is the marriage of his more-is-more approach to an unlikely subject. Using multiple flashbacks, hallucinations, and myriad video and film textures, Boyle goes for broke in attempting to evoke Ralston’s restless subjectivity in his physical confinement. It feels exactly like the film its reckless, jocular subject would have made out of his experiences; when I describe it as the longest, most punishing Gatorade commercial ever filmed, I mean that as praise; especially Gatorade actually appears in one of Ralston’s reveries.

If anything, Boyle might’ve veered too far in the opposite direction of the narrative’s inherent monotony. Though there’s never any doubt about the film’s stylistic audacity, the flourishes often flirt with obnoxiousness, and threaten to overwhelm the human centre provided by Franco’s alternately funny and emotionally draining performance. 127 Hours’ greatest achievement is also its weakness; it’s never boring, but a little more formal discipline could’ve helped it resonate more.

Originally Published Drum Media issue 1046, p61 (Flipbook)

HOW DO YOU KNOW

Writer/director James L Brooks has a latent taste for the unwieldy. Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News were prototypical crowdpleasing 80’s dramedies – whatever their flaws, missing the mark wasn’t among them. His 1994 flop I’ll Do Anything, however, was a victim of poor test screenings that led to the removal of its numerous Prince-written musical sequences(!). The original musical version of that film is yet to see the light of day, but its alleged messiness and erratic shape is something that distinguishes How Do You Know, Brooks’ latest romantic comedy.

On paper, however, it couldn’t be more generic; perennial human chipmunk Reese Witherspoon, here a softball player recently cut from her team, finds herself romantically entangled with a baseball-playing goofball (Owen Wilson) and a corporate goofball (Paul Rudd). Over the course of the film’s unwarranted 2+ hour runtime, the film goes off the rails with its slight plot, but it’s frequently funny and goofily charming on a scene-by-scene basis. A scene involving a heartfelt marriage proposal whose mood sours when it’s revealed that Rudd hadn’t hit [rec] as instructed, is particularly sharp, and of a piece with the film’s heightened look at people constantly standing outside themselves.

Admittedly, How Do You Know is a lacklustre rom-com; Rudd and Wilson are frequently hilarious on their own, but there’s no chemistry between Witherspoon and either of them, and the characters are all neurotic to point of autism. The glaring faults don’t end there – the music score is a ghastly drone of whimsy, and a late-film subplot involving corporate crime goes nowhere. But, but… the film survives thanks to its distinctively oddball sensibility. In the realm of this most cookie-cutter of genres, that counts as progress.

Originally Published Drum Media issue 1045, p58 (Flipbook)