Buried (4/5 Stars)

Six Feet Under the Ground and Dealing with a Bureaucracy. The Horror.

The first thing we see is nothing. Just a black screen and some breathing. It sounds like a person sleeping. Then it sounds like that person has waken up. And then the person seems confused. And then very worried. And then frantic. And then finally terrified. Then a glimmer of light from a Zippo Lighter is set off and we see a close-up of Ryan Reynolds face. He is bound, gagged, and bleeding. Worse, he has been encased in a box of wood with no latch or lid. Nobody can hear his screams. He has been buried alive. Why? We aren’t sure yet. We know only as much as Reynolds knows, and right now, he doesn’t know anything. This movie, directed by Rodrigo Cortes, is told entirely within the point of view of the prisoner. There is no score. There are no scenes that take place above ground. There isn’t even any lighting. When the Zippo lighter goes out, the screen goes entirely black. For all intents and purposes, Ryan Reynolds is the only cast member. The movie is 95 minutes long and played in real time. What this means is that we, the audience, are essentially stuck in the box with Reynolds for the entire movie with absolutely no distractions. If you’re claustrophobic then maybe you should skip this one. Unless of course you’re claustrophobic but also like to get the shit scared out of you. Than this is a must see. It sort of proves the old maxim that the better a horror movie is made the less enjoyable it is to watch. This is a very good horror movie. Having said that and I don’t ever want to see it again.

Because the movie’s limited pov basically constrains the suspense to come solely from plot development, an extensive review of the plot will essentially ruin the movie. Therefore, I will only briefly describe things that are in the first fifteen minutes. The Ryan Reynolds character finds a cell phone (not his) that was placed in the coffin with him. He starts calling people up and informs them that he was a truck driver working for a contractor in Iraq delivering kitchen equipment when insurgents attacked his convoy. He was knocked unconscious and woke up in the coffin. He doesn’t know where he is or whether there are any other survivors. Then the bad guys call him up and demand ransom money by a certain time or they will leave him to rot there. Without giving too much up, here are also three general things I learned. First, navigating a government bureaucracy in order to get in contact with the appropriate rescue personnel is a lot more aggravating than usual when you are buried alive. Being put on hold and having to listen to elevator music doesn’t help. Second, depending on the context, trick answering machine messages are not as funny as people think they are. Third, even if you happen to be buried alive, things can always get worse. Much. Worse.

In many ways this is a stunt movie. The makers are betting that they can realistically tell a feature length story completely within a coffin without the audience getting restless or bored. It’s a pretty big leap of faith (the upside is that there was probably a very low budget), which essentially relies entirely on a creative screenplay which gives the prisoner logical and creative things to do for the entire running time and a performance good enough to pull off what is essentially a one man show. It works. Chris Sparling wrote a watertight screenplay and Ryan Reynolds has never been better. Normally you would think a role like this should get a lot more award buzz than it has. The reason it hasn’t probably has to do with the fact that James Franco plays a very similar type of role in “127 Hours,” and he is getting the entirety of the buzz instead.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that James Franco did a better job. They both did very good jobs. When it comes to this sort of thing you really start to see the subjectivity of an awards season. For instance people may feel that only one “stuck and unable to move for the entire movie,” performance should be nominated in a given year even if they think both are worthy. Or they may take into consideration that Franco has had very good performances before (Pineapple Express, Milk) and Reynolds, best known for “Van Wilder,” and “The Proposal,” hasn’t and conclude that Reynolds can wait until next time. Or it could have simply been because Franco’s performance is more memorable because “127 Hours” is a better movie. In that case some of the credit for Franco’s superiority should be attributed to the director Danny Boyle and crew and all the special effect they employed to help the story along. As far as I know there aren’t any complicated special effects in “Buried.” (There are always some performances that get nominated simply because the movie is good, not because the performances are all that great. What’s the name of that one woman who was nominated for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Oh that’s right, I didn’t bother to remember her name.) It’s too bad. This role looked like it must have been a very rough thing to pull off what with the whole being buried alive thing. That sucks. I'm sorry Paul, I'm sorry.