Review of Buried (2010) by Shiira — 04 Nov 2010

Paul Conroy(Ryan Reynolds) isn't dead, but the American is halfway there; he's buried; he's a goner, so for all intents and purposes, he's dead, as are all the phantasmagorical residents of St. Agnes Cemetery, the people who know Francis Phelan, the patron saint of drunkards from William Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Ironwood".

The washed-up major league ballplayer's loved ones conduct their lives in pine boxes, under the dirt, an imitation of life, his parents, his infant son, subterranean and regimented. They're zombies who became mixed-up angels, playing the role of guardian instead of brain-eater.

It's a lifestyle that the American in Iraq has come to know; his life, suddenly interrupted, when insurgents bomb a convoy of trucks driven by apolitical truck drivers, like Paul, the "lucky" one, the survivor, who stops being a zombie, perhaps realizing, finally, that he's complicit in the war, soldier or not.

Alone, but not alone, since the Blackberry his captors leave behind, allows Paul to call for help, and more importantly, give people the vicarious experience of being him, attributable to the wireless gadget's video recording and subsequent transmitting of the hostage "tape" into cyberspace.

Being her, being Saskia(Johanna Ter Steege), it's what the killer in George Sluzier's "Spoorloos"(American title: "The Vanishing") promises Rex(Gene Berloets), if he just drinks the coffee spiked with sleeping pills.

Released during the pre-Internet days of the late-eighties, when rotary phones were on the wane, but still in use, in which the limitations imposed by an analog-based technology would have made it harder for millions of people to "share the exact same experience"(translated from the Dutch), the tortured lover, bereft of the futuristic hypothetical that Saskia's final moments could turn up on YouTube, ends up drinking from the cup, and becomes a victim of YouDie.

Rex is the only one who knows how she died. When the effects of the drugs wear off, he starts screaming, having neither the technological means(a cell phone), nor kung fu(the hands of "The Bride") to escape; he doesn't have a prayer, as "Spoorloos" ends on an unsettling note of unfathomable suffering.

The moviegoer never gets comfortable with the idea of being buried alive. Brevity is the key. "Buried" overstays its welcome. Whereas(in "Ironwood") Francis' father "smoked roots of grass" and mother "wove crosses from the dead dandelions and other deep-rooted weaves" as they lay in their graves, likewise, a semblance of culture makes burial seem almost tolerable, in which the Blackberry slowly normalizes Paul's once-frantic predicament, as the film's extended running time(as opposed to "Spoorloos") allows the moviegoer to orientate himself with the extreme spatial dimensions.

Knowing this, the filmmaker resorts to cheap tricks as a matter of readdressing Paul's dislocation, like the episode with the snake, and the episode with his mother, shameless manipulations both, of our phobias and heartstrings, respectively.

"Buried" may be experimental in form, but the content is pure Hollywood, depicted in a filmic language that's minimalist, but it's minimalism by default, dictated by the confines, not by existentialism.

Paul is always doing something; he never just lies there and contemplates his inevitable demise, as Rex does, when he simply whispers his lover's name. "Buried" could not have been made without the advent of the cell-phone.

Just like contemporary life, a person who relies on on-line friends, a whole host of faces and disembodied voices, doesn't need to be in a coffin to be isolated. Similar to Joel Schumacher's "Phone Booth", this paean to the information age represents a passing of the torch, as our phone booths slowly turn into ruins, without lament, by us, or perhaps, even by Superman.

"Buried" is a perfect expression of our love affair with technology, in which man and phone are entombed in a parasitic relationship.