Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/7/10
*****SPOILER
ALERT: No honest review of Buried can possibly leave you
not having guessed how the movie ends, so I'm not even going to try to
dance around it. This is really just a review for those who've already
seen the movie or don't care to*****
How
reliant is a movie on the way it ends? You spend 90-99 percent of
the time you're watching a film not knowing how it will end, so if you
really enjoy everything about the experience but fall somewhere between
dissatisfied and betrayed by how things work out, is the movie “ruined”?
Over time, as I develop and deepen my appreciation of the movies,
I've become less likely to throw the baby out with the bathwater in the
case of a movie like Rodrigo Cortes' high concept stunt Buried.
There is a great deal to admire about this film, from the way Cortes actually
manages to stage an entire 94-minute story inside a coffin to a sensational
Ryan Reynolds performance only his most ardent fans would have believed
he had in him. But make no mistake, I don't know a single person
who would be willing to let bygones be bygones and agree to disagree with
the roughly 30 seconds that literally had members of the audience I saw
Buried with shouting “No!” as it cut to black. While it seems
like an electrifying and inventive thriller for most of its running time,
signs progressively pile up that Buried is really a very angry,
very European riff on the old saying “Life's a bitch, and then you die.”
Paul
Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) is a truck driver working for an independent contractor
in Iraq. His convoy was attacked and he awakens in a coffin, presumably
buried underground. There are a few things in the box with him:
lighter, flashlight, two glowsticks, pencil, flask of alcohol and, most
importantly, a cell phone. Its screen displays only Arabic text,
and when it rings he speaks to Jabir (Jose Luis Garcia Perez), who tells
him a ransom of five million dollars will be necessary to save his life.
Paul uses the phone for all it's worth, and calls 911, 411 and a few remembered
numbers to make contact with the contractor, the State Department and his
wife's answering machine. His primary contact proves to be the State
Department's Dan Brenner (Robert Patterson), who's clearly handling Paul
and trying to keep him from using the cell phone to contact the press or
aid the terrorists by making a ransom video as Jabir has demanded.
Paul's situation is clearly dire, and there's more facing him than just
running out of air: the box isn't airtight, and things can get in
through its cracks... things like snakes and a relentless trickle of sand.
There
are two extreme sets of viewers where endings are concerned: those
who insist everything turn out well and all live happily ever after, and
those who aren't happy unless the film in question “has the guts” to kill
everybody and screw them over hard on the way out. Buried
is, as you might have guessed, a movie for the second group, but that doesn't
mean it's not really something to behold before it gets its O.Henry on
in the closing moments. Cortes and his cinematographer Eduard Grau
(with an assist from Reynolds, who had to light the scenes himself by positioning
the phone and various lights) do an absolutely astonishing job of moving
the camera around in this most enclosed of movie spaces to keep it from
getting dull, while Reynolds unleashes his full star power and plumbs previously
unknown depths of despair and empathy to keep us with Paul throughout his
horrific ordeal. There are lots of good vocal performances as the
people on the other end of the phone, with Patterson just squirly enough
that we don't trust him even though nothing he says is really wrong, and
Stephen Toblowsky at his most odious as the corporate stooge who isn't
exactly concerned about Paul's well-being. Perez, on the other hand,
sounds so much like someone “doing” an Arab terrorist that I'm not sure
I ever believed that's who had actually kidnapped Paul in the first place.
Writer
Chris Spalding does a good job amping up the tension and making Paul smart
enough to make the most out of the tools at his disposal. To be in
the audience saying “for crying out loud, call 411!” would be fatal to
the enterprise. With an assist from Victor Reyes' melodramatic score
(and I mean that in a good way), Cortes keeps building and building and
building suspense to the point where I was utterly on the edge of my seat,
even while having a nagging sense that the filmmakers weren't exactly on
their hero's side.
And,
of course, they're not, and that friction is at the heart of what makes
Buried less than all it can be. I harken back to last month's
The American, a very European film with an
American star. There, George Clooney and his character were as one
with the film's tone and intentions, so the way it unfolds and ends seem
totally organic. Buried, on the other hand, is so busy engaging
us in the suspense of Paul's dilemma, and Reynolds' performance so full
of can-do bravado that only those of us paying attention to the script's
emerging themes will notice that this is really an anti-war (and, to a
certain degree, anti-American) screed rather than a simple thriller.
Many of its admirers will insist that it's following its story relentlessly
to its only possible conclusion, but Buried devotes virtually no
energy to anything other than finding a way out of that coffin. Were
it a story about the man in the box coming to grips with his inevitable
demise, that's a whole other matter, but the film barely even notices that
there's only so much air in that coffin. In fact, the twist I was
expecting was that he wasn't REALLY buried underground, but the movie's
got other ideas, none of them cheerful.
On
one level, Buried has a Kafkaesque feel: Paul can't move as
he deals with bureaucrats who fall somewhere between sinister and insane,
trapped in a box slowly filling with sand. The unsubtle metaphor
about an American public that allowed its government to bury it in that
box (albeit to a lesser degree than the filmmakers might have believed:
the movie would have played a lot better if it had found release before
most American forces withdrew from Iraq) isn't bad. The problem lies
in the movie's refusal to sufficiently answer the question of whether it's
Paul's own fault that he's in Iraq, and thus in the box. He and Jabir
briefly argue about whether each deserved their respective fates, having
not supported, respectively, the invasion and Saddam's government, and
perhaps that's enough for overseas audiences. But while Paul may
be driving a supply truck as part of an unjust war effort, Jabir is burying
people alive in boxes. And as long as we don't really feel like Paul
deserves his fate on some level, Buried doesn't really work the
way it so obviously wants to.
But
it does work extremely well as a thriller (the snake sequence is a real
show-stopper), and the film's obvious pretensions have the effect of cushioning
the blow of the climax at least a little bit unlike, say, the pointlessly
cruel wrap-up of Open Water, which still irks me to this day.
Buried represents a real test of the four-star rating system, and
I don't recommend it to most moviegoers. But man, oh, man it was
really rolling with just seconds to go and its many flaws really only become
clear in hindsight. That's got to be worth a positive review, doesn't
it? OK, maybe not if you're buried in a box of sand, but otherwise... |
