‘Holy shit, it’s like a metaphor for life’. Danny Boyle’s much anticipated follow-up to Slumdog Millionaire is every bit as underwhelming as you imagined it would be. Based on Aron Ralston’s autobiography, Between A Rock And A Hard Place, in which the hero’s arm becomes trapped beneath a fallen boulder while hiking, the intrigue surrounding the film is of the rather immediate, grotesque variety. People will, of course, pay to see a man cutting off his own arm with a tool ill-equipped for the purpose. On the other hand, they’ll go to see a film by a well-regarded director featuring a handsome and talented actor like James Franco, but one expects the former reasoning to be the more influential of the two. Roger Ebert has praised Boyle for ‘conquering the unfilmable’ (hint: use flashbacks!), a grandiose acclamation which holds no water whatsoever, with the increasing amount of formally-challenging cinema emerging in the mainstream creating its own context of the aesthetically quotidian which demands to be transcended (last year’s Buried being a fine example). While the film grips one relatively consistently from beginning to end (despite its opening five minutes, with Franco ‘conquering’ a desert-landscape, appearing to be the longest Pepsi Max commercial ever), one wonders why this intensely personal, suffocated film was made in the first instance, and to what end?
Words: Oisin Murphy
