Ryan Reynolds isn’t someone anyone should feel sorry for. He’s handsome, talented, and more or less guaranteed to be rich beyond his wildest dreams in time for the 10th anniversary of 9/11, thanks to his upcoming role as Green Lantern. According to Hollywood insiders, or at least the handful I know, he’s seen as a future megastar, and his performance in Rodrigo Cortes’s Buried, which screens Tuesday at the Toronto International Film Festival, is the type of tour-de-force that can lift an actor out of the ranks of rom-com McDreamies and onto the picture-opening A-list. It’s not just that Reynolds spends the entirety of Buried on screen; it’s that he spends it in a wooden coffin, buried under the Iraqi desert, with little more than a Zippo and an Arabic-language cell phone to keep him company. That we wind up not only feeling his pain but truly understanding him, both as an individual and as an Everyman whose predicament mirrors that of down-on-their-luck American schlubs from coast to coast and beyond, is a testament to his remarkable skill, endurance, and ingenuity as an actor.
Unfortunately, in one of those strange Movieland coincidences that in 2005 and 2006 brought us two Truman Capote biopics, Buried is up against another movie about a young man pinned underground, forced to summon unimagined wellsprings of strength and inventiveness in an all-out fight for their lives. And that movie—Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, starring the restlessly gifted James Franco—is simply breathtaking.
Buried is a fable. While it’s subject is ostensibly the Iraq war, one has the sense that screenwriter Chris Sparling’s understanding of the conflict is limited to what can be gleaned from scattered headlines and good old-fashioned common sense. Terrorists are ruthless, but they’re really just desperate folks trying to feed their kids. Military contracting companies are evil—really evil—but their employees are just hard-working people trying to feed their kids. The military may or may not be trying to do the right thing, but the fate of individuals doesn’t exactly rank high on its list of priorities.
Not that anyone wants a complex deconstruction of the war. God, no. What we’re really here for is to trip out, in a high-tech, high-concept way, on a classic stoner’s what-if scenario: Dude, what would you do if you were buried alive? The answer, not too surprisingly, is try to break your way out and, when that fails, hope and pray for someone to rescue you. If you had a cell phone that, rather more surprisingly, actually got reception, you’d call a bunch of people and try to get them to take you seriously enough to get you the hell out of there. You’d also call your wife to tell her you love her, check in with mom, and make some basic provisions for passing on your meagre belongings to loved ones. Oh, and—stop now if you don’t want to know any more about the plot—if a terrorist kidnapper happened to ring up and offer some suggestions for how you could save yourself, you’d probably do your best to comply.
Ryan Reynolds in Buried.
Buried was made for $15 million, which evidently is not very much for a feature film these days. So it’s probably unfair to compare it to 127 Hours, to which Boyle, fresh from his Oscar triumph for Slumdog Millionaire, was able to devote considerable resources. Still, it’s almost sad how unhip Buried seems when stacked up against this inevitable competitor. Beginning with Trainspotting, Boyle has been our bard of youth culture, and he uses every audio-visual weapon in his considerable arsenal to make his objectively uncool hero—a Kokopelli-minded mountain-biker who is literally mocked by members of the opposite sex for his taste in jam bands (take that, asshole Phish fans)—seem like the biggest badass to hit celluloid since Ewan McGregor told us to “choose life.”
Much of that has to do with Franco, who projects a manic lust for nature that makes Emile Hirsch in Into the Wild look like Billy Crystal from City Slickers. When that lust leads Franco’s Aron Ralston down a ravine and into trouble, after a small boulder lands on his arm, literally pinning him to the canyon wall, his first reaction is not a shriek of pain but a look of stunned confusion. A trained rescuer, Ralston expects to be the master of nature, not its victim. After whacking the rock every which way in a desperate effort to pry himself loose, he announces in a tone of outraged indignation, “This is completely insane!”
And so it is. Since 127 Hours is based on a very well-documented true story, we all know what is coming: after exhausting every other avenue to freedom, Ralston will cut through his own arm in a last-ditch, and miraculously successful, bid for survival. But the title itself tells us that it’s going to take a while. In the meantime, he will experience hunger, thirst, excruciating pain, dangerous hallucinations, and profound regret for being the kind of selfish, cocky, uncommunicative jerk who would go bounding about canyons in the middle of nowhere without sharing his itinerary with a single soul. Pinging back and forth from violent resistance to calm deliberation, with increasingly frequent detours into slack-jawed delirium, Franco keeps the audience mesmerized, as we silently wonder how our strategies for self-preservation could ever compare to the virtuoso display before us.
It’s a long buildup to a graphic, vividly gruesome scene of self-sacrifice, but the climax somehow exceeds expectations. Leaving the theater, I felt exhausted and exhilirated in a way no movie has ever made me feel before.
Buried is a vicious little film. An enjoyable, well-crafted film, with a fine lead performance, but a vicious little one all the same. The answer to its what-if question is short and not terribly sweet. 127 Hours is little, too, at least when compared to the Bombay-size epic that was Slumdog Millionaire. But the questions 127 Hours poses are larger that Buried’s what-if, and more worthy of our attention: How much can you endure? How badly do you want to live? And, ultimately: What makes you think you can make it through this life on your own?
So while I don’t feel bad for Ryan Reynolds, I don’t envy any actor in the excruciating position of trying to compete with James Franco.
a case of bad timing for Reynolds?
