Trance

Grade: C +

Director: Danny Boyle

Starring: James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson and Vincent Cassell

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 41 min.

A friend once said he held a special affinity for Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear because “it feels like Scorsese just having fun.” The same could be said for Danny Boyle’s Trance, his return of sorts to crime thrillers like his 1994 feature debut, Shallow Grave. But Boyle’s budgets and filmmaking collaborators have changed over the years, including regular cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (28 Days Later..., Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours). The consequence is a slick, self-assured oeuvre that, in Trance, Boyle dares to juxtapose against van Gogh, Rembrandt and Delacroix. Unfortunately, the film also mirrors a piece of modern art that holds less discernable meaning the longer you stare at it.

Introduced through a chorus of lens flares, synth bass and recital of his professional duties, Simon (James McAvoy) is an auctioneer working at a London-based auction house that’s robbed by Franck (Vincent Cassell) and his cartoony gang. Simon suffers a blow to the head during the heist of Goya’s “Witches in the Air,” briefly obfuscating the fact that Simon is complicit in the caper, the consequence of mounting gambling debts he owes Franck. Moreover, the trauma also gives Simon amnesia so he forgets where stowed away the priceless painting.

After crude means of interrogation prove fruitless, Franck turns to hypnotherapist named Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson), who quickly realizes Simon isn’t there to find his missing keys but instead the missing artwork. And she wants her cut.

An generally taut heist flick soon leaps down a psychological rabbit hole, as Elizabeth’s repeated therapy sessions provide more insight into Simon’s backstory. But everything from the storyline to the characterizations are subsumed by Boyle’s stylism. Elizabeth is too self-assured; Franck’s patience and panache belies the portrait of a seedy British gangster. As Simon devolves into a nervy knot of neuroses, Boyle at first blurs, then obliterates the line between reality and fancy.

Trance feels like a film made by someone auditing a community college course in hypnotherapy by day and watching Inception on repeat every night. It’s captivating to look upon, and I’m not (just) talking about Dawson’s frequent nudity. The photography and camerawork are polished, the cast is capable (even when their characters are miswritten), and electronica score by Underworld’s Rick Smith propels Boyle’s frenetic pace. But once you manage to catch your breath a moment, the incongruities and illogic crowd out the visual acuity.

As the false endings pile up, there’s the chatty Big Reveal that ties up the loose ends...except it doesn’t. Boyle’s marriage of art and psychoanalysis implodes into an indulgent morass of mixed motives and plot twists. At one point, a character is given the option of pressing a button on a computer screen that will enable that person to “forget everything.” Bleary viewers of Trance won’t require any such assistance.

*Originally published at Indyweek.com

127 Hours

Rock 'n' Roll

Grade: B +

Director: Danny Boyle

Starring: James Franco, Amber Tamblyn, Kate Mara, and Clémence Poésy

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 93 minutes

The Book of Job is the most vexing story in the Bible. In order to test his faith, God permits the righteous Job to suffer at the hands of Satan: Job loses his possessions, endures physical harm, and his offspring are killed. Even worse is that entire exercise stems from a wager between God and Satan over whether the pious Job would succumb and curse God under the pressure of such loss.

In “127 Hours,” director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) tells the harrowing, heroic tale of Aron Ralston (James Franco), a mountain climber who, in 2003, fell into a chasm while canyoneering through Robbers Roost in Utah and remained trapped for over five days after his right arm became literally caught between a rock and a hard place.

Aided by the pulsating score of his Slumdog composer, A.R. Rahman, and a light camera that enables tracking shots in tight places, Boyle splendidly and intimately dramatizes Ralston’s incredible efforts at survival and escape over the titular timeframe. Beyond trying to stave off dehydration and the elements, his biggest battle becomes the one with his own psyche. Water-colored memories of family and the rollercoaster relationship with his ex-girlfriend Rana (Clémence Poésy) soon transition into delusions of escape, a party with two hikers (Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn) he met earlier in the day, and, in the film’s unquestioned highlight, a radio interview he conducts with himself over the stupidity of not telling anyone where he was planning to hike that day.

Throughout the film, Boyle places the viewer in proximity to Ralston’s viewpoint, whether he is diving into underground aquifers or drinking his own urine. Meanwhile, Franco, in an awards-worthy performance, shows Ralston progress through the five stages of grief. Thus, by the time a vision of his unborn son propels Ralston to finally seek a grisly escape, the once unthinkable seems almost inevitable in both his mind and that of the audience. While some may be unprepared for the visceral “money scene” – Boyle uses makeup and sounds effects to make viewers feel every hack through bone and sinew – its explicitness is essential to the film’s impact.

127 Hours succeeds in telling the story of a man who comes to grips with his own fallibility and vulnerability. When Ralston futilely screams for help after first being trapped in his rocky dungeon, Boyle slowly pans the camera out to show the sheer expanse of desolate earth surrounding him. Later, after Ralston climactically climbs out of his would-be catacomb, the heavens part and the music swells as he exclaims “I need help!” to three by-passers.

Matters become thornier, however, when Boyle expands the saga into a moral of redemption and salvation. Ralston is couched as a flawed man, but as best I can tell, he’s a wiseacre who doesn’t return his mother’s phone calls as often as he should and was negligent in his breakup with Rana. Otherwise, he appears to be a disarming, devil-may-care thrill-seeker who cares about his family and friends. Like Job, there’s a disconnect between the Ralston’s personal “transgressions” and the consequent tribulations heaped upon him, one that Boyle does not seem to adequately bridge.

However, the exegesis of the Book of Job is not necessarily righteousness and mercy, but rather the brutal lesson of man’s helplessness in the face of nature’s whims, whether inflicted at random or at the behest of a supreme being. The finale to Boyle’s film is joyful and life-affirming. But, like Into the Wild and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, 127 Hours is ultimately the story of a prideful man who fancies nature but misapprehends his place in it.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/james-franco-is-out-on-a-limb-in-127-hours/Content?oid=1846799

Slumdog Millionaire

Before you answer the question,

first it's time to sing and dance!

Grade: A

Director: Danny Boyle

Starring: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Irfan Khan, and Anil Kapoor

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours

In his travel narrative Following the Equator, Mark Twain wrote, “India has two million gods, and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.”

Some may regard the theatrical release of the Mumbai-set Slumdog Millionaire as poorly timed in light of the bloody terrorist attacks that recently struck India’s most populous city. In truth, current events bring to the forefront the religious and cultural strife that have long plagued the country, one of the many undercurrents running throughout director Danny Boyle’s masterful cinematic masala. Blending historical perspective, grim reality, whimsy, crime drama, and starry-eyed romance, Boyle crafts a character-driven, post-modern Dickensian tale of epic proportions.

Slumdog Millionaire depicts an India teetering uneasily between the old and the new, an amalgam of traditional religious values and Western economic and cultural influences. The film’s leitmotif – an 18-year-old Muslim and former street orphan competing on a Hindi version of the American game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? – encapsulates this conflict. Indeed, the very name of the show could serve as the mantra for today’s generation of young Indians weaned (like their American counterparts) on a diet of capitalism and materialism.

The film’s opening scene shows the game show contestant, Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), being tortured and interrogated by police suspicious that he has cheated his way to the final question and a chance to win 20 million rupees. The script by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), based on Vikas Swarup’s novel Q and A, flashes back upon Jamal’s life, from his hardscrabble upbringing in Mumbai’s slums to his single-minded goal to win the heart of his lifelong love, Latika (Freida Pinto). Jamal explains to skeptical investigators how the 12 questions he has already correctly answered relate to events in his past, many of which coincide with India’s own history and modern-day development. A question about what weapon Hindu god Lord Rama holds in his hand recalls a Hindu mob’s raid on the Muslim slums where Jamal lived as a child during which Jamal’s mother was slain. Jamal finds the answer to a geography question about London in the mock street signs adorning the call center where he works as a chaiwalla (tea server), a derisive term the quiz-show’s duplicitous host (Bollywood vet Anil Kapoor) uses to openly mock Jamal.

The show’s final question references Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, a metaphor for the film’s central, triangular relationship between Jamal, his brother Salim, and Latika (a trio of terrific actors portray each character at different stages in their lives). Orphaned during childhood, each is enslaved as slumdogs, street urchins consigned to a life of beggary, petty theft, and prostitution. Their unending attempt to escape Mumbai’s mean streets and a life of crime frames the rest of the storyline, particularly as it relates to Salim, who graduates into working as a hired gun for a local crime boss as a means to secure both power and protection. Salim’s treatment of Jamal and Latika is both loving and monstrous. Beginning when, as children, Salim steals and pawns Jamal’s prized autograph from a Bollywood film star, to the day Salim casts out Jamal at gunpoint and claims Latika as his own, the apt metaphor for Jamal and Salim is more Jacob and Esau than Cain and Abel.

Perceptible thematic and stylistic echoes of Fernando Meirelles’ favela epic City of God resonate (although no one depicts grit and grime with more visual flair than Boyle (Trainspotting; 28 Days Later)). Instead of a sheer sociocultural exposé, however, at the heart of Slumdog Millionaire beats a redemptive, romantic, rags-to-rajah fable that transcends its jaundiced milieu without aestheticizing it. While vacillations in Jamal and Salim’s relationship occasionally lack adequate explication, the love story between Jamal and Latika quickly assumes a life of its own. When Jamal uses his Phone-a-Friend lifeline during the show’s climax, the combination of scriptwriting and staging makes for the most soaring bit of romantic uplift found on film this year. Even the Bollywood-inspired song-and-dance routine Boyle rolls outs over the closing credits feels somehow organic and, well, right.

Twain felt a similar emotional uplift when he reflected, “So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds.” As India attempts to rebound back to this ideal, one more lesson from Slumdog Millionaire rings true: Triumph is often born out of struggle.

Neil Morris