Rodrigo Cortes, “Buried” (2010)
For a one-trick pony in which the trick is one man stuck in a wooden box buried 2 metres underground, this is quite suspenseful and entertaining. I only wonder for how long the novelty of a plot of one-man / one-set lasting 95 minutes will outlast the movie itself long after it has left the cinemas. At least Ryan Reynolds, playing the burial victim, does a good job of being nearly constantly in motion – even if at times that motion consists of perspiring heavily, gulping for air and trying to calm himself down so as not to waste his oxygen – throughout the film. Hardly much scenery to chew up, that’s true, but to keep the audience’s attention riveted on himself and not over-act or under-act must have been a hard job for Reynolds.
Fortunately modern technology in the form of a mobile phone – ah, now this film would never have been possible without mobile phone and GPS technology to make it all credible! – provides our protagonist with the opportunity to chat to various unseen actors locally and across the globe so we learn how and why he ended up literally boxed in. He’s Paul Conroy, an American truck driver working for a large company CRT that has sent him to Iraq to drive supplies from one town to another. One day his convoy is ambushed by local people, he gets clobbered and passes out while the other drivers in the convoy are killed. When he comes to, he finds himself in the coffin with nothing to keep him company save the mobile phone and a cigarette lighter. Frantically he dials everyone he knows – his family, the US State Department, an emergency operator in Ohio, his employer who puts him in contact with a hostage rescue unit in Baghdad – to get help before he suffocates from lack of oxygen. The conversations he has range from heart-breaking to cruel and callous and say a great deal about how people, in particular government and corporate bureaucrats, treat unseen others deemed significant or insignificant cyphers according to their usefulness in achieving certain political and economic goals and results.
We never see any of the people Conroy speaks to and this deliberate ploy to keep the action concentrated on Conroy in the coffin heightens the alienation and isolation he feels, particularly after his employer fires him so as to disown all responsibility for his fate and to his family, as well as the tension. From time to time Conroy’s kidnappers, represented by a lone accented voice, contact him to demand he film a video of himself and transmit it to Youtube or to cut off his finger on a second video. This provides for one of a number of moments of black humour, in which Conroy is told by his would-be rescuers that his first video received 47,000 hits on Youtube which have no effect on the urgency of the rescue effort; other moments include his conversation with a woman who may be an ex-girlfriend. One conversation he has which may strike audiences as cruel, blackly funny or pathetic is with his mother who has dementia.
The limitations of this one-man / one-set movie quickly become obvious: Conroy, representing an average Joe in a political context he barely understands, can only be obsessed with rescue and the people he converses with quickly exhaust the scriptwriter’s options of reactions from non-responsive and helpless to tragically incompetent and ruthlessly uncaring. The kidnappers themselves are knowledgeable about Iraq’s recent politics and history but it’d be stretching credibility and audience attention levels for them and Conroy to start arguing politics. I guess too when a person is stuck in a coffin for two hours with a mobile phone and limited oxygen, the last thing s/he’d be thinking of is philosophical questions about life, death, the universe and “Why did the kidnappers kill the other truck drivers but bury ME alive instead?”
The temptation for the scriptwriter to throw in sub-plot diversions like visiting creepy-crawlies and a sand leak into the box becomes strong and so Conroy must contend with a snake and a nearby bomb explosion that causes the sand leak; certainly these increase the suspense but the introduction of the snake and the way it’s done (sneaking into Conroy’s trousers while he dozes off) have the feel of a cheap gimmick.
At least director Cortes has the good sense to cut the film at 95 minutes, giving a result that is lean and fairly credible. Even at this length, the concept is stretching thin and the director and scriptwriter have thrown every idea they can into it: Conroy gets filmed from nearly every angle possible, he has one hallucinatory episode of being rescued, he contemplates suicide, the camera does numerous close-ups and pans away at least twice to give the impression of Conroy in a tube-like box (increasing his sense and the audience’s sense of total isolation), and there is a “so close yet so far away” moment in the film. This is the kind of film you watch at least once, to see how a particular concept should be treated in a commercial film context and how directors and scriptwriters can milk the concept for all it’s worth. Beyond that, we’re probably getting into the realm of Samuel Beckett who in his play “Happy Days” did so much more with the idea of one-person-buried-alive but we’re not talking commercial films any more.