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Sunday, September 26, 2010
MOVIE REVIEW
Buried
Help! A Shrill, Desperate Cry Against Bureaucracy
Ryan Reynolds as Paul Conroy, trapped with the element of time sans space in
"Buried".
LionsGate
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
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Sunday,
September 26, 2010
Zut alors! Crikey! Red tape horror!
"Buried", which plays like a standstill version of "Speed", will be viewed by
many as either a nasty, grievous tease, an absurdity or a waste of time.
Yet Ryan Reynolds' solo act has enough caché to keep audiences interested and
entertained. The Lionsgate release opened on Friday in additional select
cities across the U.S., joining the New York and Los Angeles markets.
Mr. Reynolds plays Paul Conroy, a truck driver for a U.S. independent contractor
company in Iraq (think: Blackwater/XE). He wakes up somewhere in the
aforementioned Middle Eastern country in a box just big enough to call his home.
(No, not an box apartment on the Upper East Side of New York.) The entire
film consists of Mr. Reynolds, darkness and four immediate, distinct and vital
characters: a cell phone, a lighter, a pen and time, the most important
ingredient of all.
Rodrigo Cortés directs "Buried", whose movie poster markets a slight variation
on the "Alien" poster,
with an "in zero space no one can hear you scream" situation. At its heart
however, "Buried" is a horror story about bureaucracy run amok. Save for
one or two brief shots, the film, nicely lensed by young cinematographer Eduard
Grau ("A Single Man"), is neither grisly nor
graphic, but is occasionally harrowing. Its slow but steady pacing is
punctuated by silences, close-ups and sounds. Standard obstacles and
monkey wrenches are tossed Paul's way, some more psychological and demanding
than others.
"Buried" though, is an otherwise unremarkable entry in the race-against-time
drama genre. Of course there have been far better films (the original
"D.O.A.", "The Big Clock"), but what sets Mr. Cortés' film apart from more
recent others are a few of its plausible bureaucratic nightmares and
entanglements. We relate to Paul's situation not because he's trapped but
because of the claustrophobia and inertia of his dealings with those who
repeatedly try to help him. Even if we can barely breathe watching Paul
stuck in a coffin that the world's worse criminals wouldn't be caught dead in,
we choke (or chortle) when we hear a few of the useless, irrelevant and
infuriating things that are said to him on his phone. Are these voices in
Paul's head? Could they be?
To his credit, Mr. Reynolds admirably ups the ante in a film that could easily
have gone south after only a few minutes. He reacts to the dark and the
impossible space in which his character finds himself constrained. It's
actually a very physical performance from an actor normally thought of as a
comedic player, though he's worked the dramatic angle before ("The Amityville
Horror", for one.) Mr. Reynolds' character in "Buried" represents a
sounding board of matter-of-fact every-person responses, mainly reactions that
audiences can reasonably imagine under the circumstances.
The voice characters in "Buried" are numerous on the other end of Paul's cell
phone, three of which are spoken by acting coach Warner Loughlin. They are
as frustrating, idiotic and annoying as the predicament Paul finds himself in.
With the voices of: José Luis Garcìa-Pèrez, Robert Paterson, Stephen Tobolowsky,
Samantha Mathis, Ivana Miño, Erik Palladino, Cade Dundish, Juan Hidalgo,
Abdelilah Ben Massou.
"Buried"
is rated R by the Motion Picture
Association Of America for language and some violent content. The film's
running time is one hour and 34 minutes.
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