By James Cox
"Buried"
As far as Jungian, collective fears are concerned, being buried alive is a banker.
It is a perfect mix of innately terrifying elements: darkness, claustrophobia, restriction, isolation.
The act of burial, of course, is so deeply rooted in our social consciousness as being the final stanza of a funeral that the fear is positively theological. You are being buried, descending to hell, beneath a ton of earth where no one will hear your last breath.
In "Buried" director Rodrigo Cortés, shows us, with a vivid lack of mercy, just how horrific an experience that lonely hell would be.
Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) wakes up in a wooden coffin beneath Iraqi soil.
He is a contract truck driver whose convoy was ambushed by put-upon insurgents hell bent on teaching the West a lesson.
The main selling point of this film is the narrative decision not to leave the coffin, at all.
It is the ultimate single-location, situation concept.
The specially designed "set" allows Cortés the ability to make frenetic use of his limited space.
I would applaud the tight composition that heightens the claustrophobia and tethers you to Conroy as his temperament waivers between calm acceptance to frenzied panic, but it's difficult to see how you could fail to apply a cramped feel when you've opted to shoot an entire 94 minute movie in a box.
And it's in this decision that it really earns it's stripes for commitment to a premise.
It pips "Phone booth", which despite it's limitations still allows itself a ten minute, free roaming prologue around New York before settling into the call box.
It even outdoes Hitchcock's masterful "Rope", which never leaves the studio apartment in which it's based, but which feels positively brimming with activity considering its half dozen party guests and city-view balcony.
For an hour an a half Reynolds lays in a box, and we lay with him.
The miracle here is that it never gets dull.
As the air supply gets low and the gentle trickle of top soil begins to fill the coffin, I found myself captivated by the stark helplessness of the situation.
And just as in Reynold's core dilemma, time becomes irrelevant when you're buried underground.
Much has been made of his performance and he deserves the plaudits.
Fast carving himself a respectable body of work, Ryan Reynolds is a sympathetic and charming every man, comfortable in his role as the narrative fulcrum.
He even manages a little of the Van Wilder cheekiness to break the unbearable tension with a few, close to comedic phone retorts.
Unfortunately the film isn't a complete success.
Strangely, it is only when the script tries to inject narrative urgency, peripheral to the immediate threat of suffocation, that it falls flat.
Paul has a mobile phone, and it is through this that the details of his imprisonment are revealed.
The phone brings a lot of bonus points to the production with the ever decreasing battery life and fading signal, it is a tool of annoyance that ratchets up the tension at crucial moments.
But it also relegates the supporting cast to voice acts, and here it fails miserably.
Quickly we are introduced to a game of cultural stereotypes as we purvey a myriad of global accents each a little over eager to paint us a picture.
It is detrimental to the political message, that appears to have been shoe horned into the background, that the Middle Eastern antagonist sounds like an Aladdin henchman.
There is a bizarrely misjudged critique on American bureaucracy that has Ned Ryerson from Groundhog Day (incidentally a strong voice actor with a poor role) delivering an indictement of red-tape America which verges on embarrassing.
That the film manages to break free of it's sodden confines and deliver any succinct plot is a triumph.
But ultimately the film is at its best when forcing us to face the terror of the central premise.
Everything else is window dressing for an impressive Hitchcockian set piece.
Reynolds may just have earned his "serious" credentials and if Cortés can be this captivating in a box, imagine what he can achieve above ground.
ADDITIONAL:
"Buried" relies on a very personal empathy to create the lonely, claustrophobic atmosphere that heightens this conceptual nightmare.
It is purposefully restricted to a 3 x 6 ft wooden box, and although director Cortés manages to milk every twist and turn out of that narrow crate, and deliver impressive light trickery, it is not a picture with mainstream appeal on it's mind.
It's not that this film is intellectually or culturally challenging. It's a suspense thriller and Panic Room sold well enough, right? But it will test the patience of "pop-corn" audiences who demand thrills, spills, and (almost forgivably) more than one character.
Having said this, "Buried" for all it's positives, was one of the most trying cinema experiences of my life. And I do not refer to the purpose built claustrophobia.
Instead a young audience who failed to connect to the subject matter, and thus failed to commit to a challenging premise, got restless and chatty.
They became uncomfortable with the unusual cinematic cues, because they haven't learnt how to react to five minutes of darkness at the movies before.
This is not a critique of them as people, it's a challenge to the entire cinema system, to change it's policy to protect movie experience for seasoned film fans who view going to the pictures as more than a recreational pass-time, but as (arguably sadly) a genuine interest. An interest in the way I suppose book fans enjoy reading groups, or art fans peruse a gallery.
That this experience must be shared by a populist cross section of the general public who are intolerant of challenging cinema and have formed the opinon that it is socially acceptable to fraternise mid-movie is not just a mild irritant to me, but the central thesis of my next blog post!
Let the ranting commence...
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