Review

Review Date: 17-October-10
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Buried (2010)

You have to feel some admiration for a director and actor ballsy enough to shoot an entire movie inside a coffin. I certainly did admire Rodrigo Cortés and Ryan Reynolds during the first half of Buried because not only were they attempting this, they seemed to be succeeding at it. Reynolds plays an American truck driver named Paul who wakes up inside a box after he and his crew, on contract in Iraq, were attacked by locals. The movie details the next couple of hours as he tries to free himself and runs through a gamut of emotions. The viewer can see these emotions as well as hear them thanks to a Zippo and other light sources provided by Paul's captor.

The movie could not exist without such devices, the most important being a cell phone that was also placed in the box. (Watching cell phones become integral to screenplays has interested me for several years; this represents the apex of their ascendance.) The phone allows Paul to contact the world above, including his wife (whom he can't reach), his captor (who wants ransom and attention), and strangers who might effect a rescue. The phone is also the object of a glaring continuity error that roughly marks where I began to lose respect for the picture. If you're making a movie reliant on a small number of props, you had better make sure their appearance and significance are consistent from shot to shot.

What ultimately dampened my admiration for Buried is its meanness. The people whom Paul calls are not just uncomprehending or unhelpful, some are downright vicious. A family friend or relative refuses to look up a phone number because she doesn't like his panicked, insistent tone. The Human Resources director of his trucking company behaves like Satan's sidekick having an especially bad day. Whoever buried Paul alive is obviously no Florence Nightingale, but his final demand seems unreasonably lurid. The characters who emerge through the phone, considered with the movie's ending, suggest that the sole impetus for Buried was showing off ("Lookie what we're doing!"). It should be remembered that Alfred Hitchcock, whom Cortés clearly esteems, backed up his gimmicks with substance (Rear Window being the exemplar of perfection achieved from an impossible setup). Buried does imply that an individual life has no value in the present world, but I question if that's enough of a point.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.