At the time of their release, both Into the Wild and 127 Hours were well received by critics and audiences. 127 Hours was a story of survival while Into the Wild was ultimately a story of death regardless of its generally positive message. Both films focused on and were set in nature and both films contained heroes, notable for their unrelenting positivity even in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges or difficulty.
Reading reviews and speaking to people about each film, it was the positivity of 127 Hour’s James Franco and Into the Wild’s Emile Hirsch that was the main reason for the glowing feedback each film received. Both characters are earthy-types portrayed as being at one with nature and the wilderness. Audiences seemed attracted to each man’s self-belief and overwhelming inner strength, their love of people and nature, their qualities of forgiveness and ability to see the best in everyone. It is, however, these celebrated qualities that are responsible for both films being as irritating as they are.
Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsh), the hero of Into the Wild, makes friends everywhere he goes. From the fun-loving nudist Swedes he meets while canoeing down the Colorado River to an ageing and childless hippie couple, Chris can do no wrong and everybody loves him. Chris’s behaviour and the love others feel for him provides a gnawing sense of annoyance as the film progresses to all out anger in its final third as Chris befriends and becomes a surrogate-like son for sweet old man and widower, Ron (Hal Holbrook).
In the eyes of all he meets, Chris takes on a Christ-like magnetism due to his supposedly infectious, down to earth and inquisitive nature and his generous attitude towards others. Chris constantly displays an almost sinisterly perfect range of human behaviour that results in him appearing as an android-like, non-entity, an unrealistic person and a sickening suck-up. When Chris meets Ron it feels like the final straw and you actually look forward to his arrival in Alaska, his consumption of poison berries and his inevitable demise in a knackered old bus. Chris and Ron’s relationship is intended to appear sweet and touching but is actually patronising. Ron asks Chris if he would be interested in seeing some of his woodwork, thinking, of course, that young people would not care about the meaningless examples of an old man’s hobby. Chris, though, is no ordinary young man and is simply dying to see Ron’s work. We are then shown a montage of Chris in Ron’s workshop while the old man tenderly shows the fruits of his labour to a fascinated Chris. It really is quite nauseating. At this point it would have been wonderful to see Ron turn on Chris, suspicious to the point of murder with his brown-nosing and beat him to death with one of his wood works and bury the idiot in the desert. Chris is simply too much like Jesus or the perfect human being to actually sympathise with.
In the case of 127 Hours, Aron Rolston (James Franco) possesses the same levels of incredibly positivity as Chris McCandless and the film evokes feelings of irritation and anger that are strikingly similar to those experienced when watching Into the Wild. It has been argued that director Danny Boyle shot much of the film in a hyper active, frenetically edited style to try and mirror the nature of Aron Ralston and help audiences understand the character better. Perhaps this is true but it does not deflect from how simply annoying this style is particularly when you consider Boyle was in his mid 50’s when shooting this film. As Aron cycles at breakneck speed through the Utah desert as the audience are shown a split screen, wildly edited montage all accompanied by a pounding electronic soundtrack, it is hard to escape the image of Boyle sitting with his bemused editor as he desperately tries to appear young and hip while commanding cut after cut in order to make the film suitable for the reality tv generation. It just doesn’t feel right.
Aron Rolston, much like Chris McCandless, is rather annoying. He is a jumped-up, energy drink consuming, sports-walkman-wearing, gym freak and when he finds himself in the understandably ghastly position of being trapped in a remote gully with a boulder on top if his arm, he manages to put all his positive character traits to good use in order to survive his perilous situation. When, however, Chris drinks his own urine to enhance his survival and slices his arm off with a pen-knife to escape the boulder, it is impossible to feel relief and not escape the overriding feeling of disappointment that he hadn’t remained stuck under the boulder forever so his unreasonably positive attitude and sunny disposition could no longer annoy everyone. That’s one way of looking at it anyway.
