Buried (2010)
Starring Ryan Reynolds
Directed by Rodrigo Cortés
Over the last year or two, I've grown to like Ryan Reynolds as an actor. After decent turns in Definitely, Maybe and The Proposal, he'd proven to be a likable romantic lead. I wasn't sold that he could take on a serious dramatic role...let alone a role that would force Reynolds and only Reynolds to be onscreen for the entirety of the movie. Sure, Tom Hanks had done this before in Cast Away, but he had a whole island (plus Wilson) to play around with. Mr. Reynolds is stuck in a two-by-seven foot casket with only a lighter, a cell phone, a crappy flashlight, some glow sticks, and a tiny flask of alcohol. He's on his own with not much to play off of.
Same goes for the director. Rodrigo Cortés is a brave man to tackle Buried because there's no place to go outside of the coffin. One could see Hitchcock attempting to make this movie were he alive today, employing similar stylistic camera techniques that Cortés uses to keep the audience interested (for the most part). Admittedly, during the beginning, I found myself disenchanted with the film, chalking it up to a failed experiment. I was not enjoying Cortés's rather static camera shots and was pondering whether to just give up. In the end, I'm thrilled I didn't. Cortés (helped, of course, by screenwriter Chris Sparling) begins to amp up the tension, creating a claustrophobic paranoia that was certainly intriguing to watch. Two scenes I won't spoil here (but would be more than happy to discuss in the comments) -- one in the middle of the film and the flick's final moments -- were just about as good of an edge-of-your-seat cinema moment as you're going to see.
Yes, Cortés is responsible for making the film visually successful. Ryan Reynolds is responsible for the flick connecting on an emotional level with the audience. As Paul Conroy, an American working as a contracted truck driver in Iraq, his character is just a normal guy trying to earn money to keep his family together...which makes it all the more upsetting to see an everyman wake up after an Iraqi ambush in a darkened coffin underground. As he uses the cell phone in his possession to call relatives, the US government, and his captors, Reynolds succeeds in creating a believable character (whose emotions run the gamut from anger to sorrow) in an amazingly unbelievable situation.
Still, for all its positives (and there are many), the film doesn't achieve perfection. A tiny bit of editing or perhaps a more visually stimulating camera technique in the first few minutes of the flick may have been all Buried needed to crack into my Top Five films of the year. For now, it'll just have to settle for being a member of the Top Twenty.
The RyMickey Rating: B+
On a side note: Why the heck wasn't this movie released wider than it was? I can maybe understand not going completely wide with it as its premise may not appeal to the masses, but the Philly market never even saw this film hit a theater?! What's up with that? Reynolds is certainly a bankable enough star that there's really no reason this film shouldn't have been treated a bit better than it was.
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