Danny Boyle - Auteur

Trance

Trance, an expanded remake of a TV movie written and directed by Joe Ahearne in 2001, opens with a Scorsese-style illustrated lecture — narrated by protagonist Simon, played by James McAvoy with a Scots smartarsiness that can’t help but evoke once-upon-a-time Boyle fixture Ewan McGregor in his amoral boyish-grin phase

Like Inception, Fight Club, Total Recall or The Sixth Sense, Trance is an awkward film to discuss without giving too much away, but actually quite difficult to spoil

Simon, Elizabeth and Franck are difficult to care about, even before the script gets to going over its story several more times filling in narrative gaps with information which compromises any possible empathy we might feel for them. And it doesn’t stop with the end of the film — you can argue on the way home who the most reprehensible person is, or even whose trance we’ve been in, and whether the final explanation given is even final. 

127 Hours

This vibrancy is there right from the start. We’ve known that Danny Boyle can work wonders with dark subject-matters: in Slumdog Millionaire families endure unimaginable poverty, women are forced into prostitution and child beggars have their eyes gouged out by evil Fagins — even if it was described by the News Of The World as “the feel-good film of the decade”. But 127 Hours takes it to a whole new level, kicking off with a split-screen credit sequence that plays like a hyperactive Coke Zero ad, transposing solo images of James Franco-as-Ralston against vivid crowd scenes, not so much showing him as a loner but as a micro-unit in the teeming metropolis of life.

What Ralston does to get free is a thing of gruesome, nauseating wonder, but Boyle doesn’t linger on the horror. Instead, he portrays it for what it is: a painful liberation. And this is the film’s most magnificent achievement; though it appears to be about all sorts of grim nonsense, the actual message is not simply one of hope, but one delivered with a zen-like calm, a soothing voice that whispers, “This too shall pass,” in Boyle’s lovely Lancashire burr.