Will Paul get out alive? The movie's phony suspense hinges on that single question, but along the way it pretends to address other important issues, such as how little the lives of American civilians working in dangerous overseas locales mean to the U.S. government, or to those people's employers, or to anyone, really. The only people who seem to want to see Paul get out of that box are himself, his family and us; the obvious aims of the director and screenwriter (the script is by Chris Sparling) are actually better served if he dies.
Your enjoyment -- if that's the right word -- of Buried will hinge on two things: Your ability to tolerate situations in which characters are confined to very tight spaces, and your willingness to be emotionally manipulated in the cheapest way imaginable. If you truly do not want to know whether our poor, pickled hero survives his ordeal, you should stop reading now -- and I mean right now -- because it's impossible to address the picture's "One minute there's hope; the next, darkness!" shilly-shallying without giving at least some of the game away.
The first section of Buried plays, rather effectively, as a black comedy. We first join Paul, at the very beginning of his very bad day, as he's venting his frustration at being locked in a buried box. He moans, groans and yells; he gulps air as if he can't take enough of it in; he flicks his lighter to survey the cramped quarters around him. After he discovers the existence of that cellphone, and realizes he can actually reach it, he tries to use old-fashioned common sense to figure out whom to call. Confronted with a screen's worth of lettering in Arabic, he makes a stab at calling what he thinks might be a helpful number. A not-too-helpful-sounding woman answers the phone and inquires as to what the problem might be. "I'm buried alive in a box in Iraq," Paul explains to her, more or less, which she follows with some deeply annoying questions about how he got there. ("Are you in a funeral home?" she asks, daftly.) Moments later, it's revealed that he's reached a 911 dispatcher in Ohio, and the operator's "Sorry, sir, there's really not much I can do for you" response plays like an outlandish, grim joke.
But Paul doesn't give up; he just keeps on dialing, eventually reaching the home office of his employer, the State Department (at this point he challenges a government lackey to prove that the guy really has an interest in saving his life), and his wife's voicemail, where he leaves a deeply unconscionable (on the part of the screenwriter, that is) "I love you, goodbye" speech for her and his young son. Cortés seems to believe he's taking us on a profound, soul-searching journey -- what would you be thinking about in what might potentially be your last few minutes of life? -- but the effect is alternately too arch and too maudlin. Buried plays like a highly self-conscious one-man Off Broadway play in which the multiple dueling themes -- write them down in your notebooks, kids -- are Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature and Man vs. Himself.
Cortés adds the final card to this already absurdly stacked deck when the human-resources director of Paul's company (his voice belongs to Stephen Tobolowsky) gets on the line and -- get this -- fires him, so the company won't be held liable for anything that happens to him. That's a great black-comedy idea, but it's not played for laughs here; instead it's just one more extinguished match in this cramped cavern of existential bleakness.
The picture is, at least, artfully designed: Cinematographer Eduard Grau (also the DP on Tom Ford's exquisite-looking, if superchilly, A Single Man) comes up with a surprising number of inventive angles and hues -- from cool blue tones to slightly warmer grays -- to convey the inner limits of Paul's tiny prison.
And Reynolds does his damnedest to make the material work. After his sly and amusing turns in Adventureland and The Proposal, I've come around to seeing him as a gifted actor, and he's as good as anyone could possibly be in this role. Paul's understandable anxiety seems to affect the very air around him: You can almost see his fear, broken into molecular bits, vibrating in the space around him.
But Buried puts the audience through an emotional workout only to -- surprise! -- pull the rug out at the last minute. Which, if you think about it, is hardly a surprise at all. The movie ends the only way it can, but we aren't even allowed to walk away from it feeling bereft. Instead, we know we've just seen a cool, clever suspense tale in which one man's life hangs in the balance. Paul's life is treated as a novelty. Out there in the audience, we're treated as suckers.