The 33
Directed by: Patricia Riggen
Written by: Mikko Alanne and Craig Borten and Michael Thomas - Based on the book "Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free"
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Rodrigo Santoro, Juliette Binoche, James Brolin, Lou Diamond Phillips, Mario Casas, Jacob Vargas, Oscar Nuñez, Cote de Pablo, Bob Gunton, Gabriel Byrne
Biography/Drama/History - 120 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 9 Nov 2015
Written by: Mikko Alanne and Craig Borten and Michael Thomas - Based on the book "Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free"
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Rodrigo Santoro, Juliette Binoche, James Brolin, Lou Diamond Phillips, Mario Casas, Jacob Vargas, Oscar Nuñez, Cote de Pablo, Bob Gunton, Gabriel Byrne
Biography/Drama/History - 120 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 9 Nov 2015
Director Patricia Riggen confronts a near impossible task in her telling of the incredible story of the 33 Chilean miners trapped 2,300 feet beneath the Earth's surface. Everyone already knows how it ends. I was deployed in a remote part of Afghanistan in 2010 during these events, as far as you can get from Chile’s dry Atacama Desert, and I knew exactly what was going on. Were the miners alive? What was the day count up to today of how long they were entombed? The whole world watched. With such intense scrutiny, how does a filmmaker build suspense and draw an audience into a story they could probably tell themselves?
I do not envy Riggen’s assignment because there must be only a few ways to create tension and wind-up the audience without cheating and incorporating fictional events into a very nonfiction story. Riggen does not succeed in creating suspenseful dramatic action. The 33 is not necessarily too soon after the events portrayed to make an impact. The problem is Riggen chose sensationalized melodrama over in-depth characterization. Yes, we get to know a few of the miners and their families well and even a few of their idiosyncrasies, but true personality exploration is held at arm’s length while Riggen amps up the emotions of not knowing, bureaucratic infighting, and the tears and fears of loved ones.
I do not envy Riggen’s assignment because there must be only a few ways to create tension and wind-up the audience without cheating and incorporating fictional events into a very nonfiction story. Riggen does not succeed in creating suspenseful dramatic action. The 33 is not necessarily too soon after the events portrayed to make an impact. The problem is Riggen chose sensationalized melodrama over in-depth characterization. Yes, we get to know a few of the miners and their families well and even a few of their idiosyncrasies, but true personality exploration is held at arm’s length while Riggen amps up the emotions of not knowing, bureaucratic infighting, and the tears and fears of loved ones.
Based on Hector Tobar’s “Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free,” the only authorized account of the events, Riggen weaves in the distinct Chilean setting but perplexingly makes some off-putting choices giving us more of a Hollywood than Chilean atmosphere. For example, these are rugged Chilean miners we’re watching. Why are they speaking Chilean-accented English? Patricia Riggen is Mexican and the movie’s lead actors are all Spanish speakers including Antonio Banderas and Lou Diamond Phillips. Riggen shot the film in Copiapó, Chile, the same mining village where the miners lived. The cave in and small living space the men share looks authentic. Why on Earth am I listening to English?
Furthermore, why is one of the world’s greatest actresses, French woman Juliette Binoche (Clouds of Sils Maria), playing the lead family member character up on the surface? She looks nothing like her fellow cast mates and is a gargantuan distraction. Sure, her performance is sublime as always, but how am I ever to believe Juliette Binoche as the estranged sister of the irritable, alcoholic miner? I have a feeling I would use American Bob Gunton (Argo), playing Chilean President Sebastian Piñera, for this example if it wasn’t for lily-white French-accented Binoche taking the brunt of this criticism.
There is no one hero in The 33. An ensemble cast shows us how hundreds of individual efforts combined to achieve the impossible. The out of his league Minister of Mines (Rodrigo Santoro, Focus) tires of the mining company’s stonewalling and gets the creaky, cumbersome government machine spinning. It helps that President Piñera sees political gold if somehow these miners are saved. It also helps that Maria, Binoche’s character, slaps the hell out of the mining minister to wake him up that there are 33 men dead or alive down there and the families aren’t going anywhere. Later on, there are chief engineers and drill masters aplenty directing traffic, but they are more background material than close-ups.
Beneath the chaos on the surface, haphazardly elected lead miner, Mario Sepúlveda (Banderas, The Expendables 3), tries to keep his 32 compatriots calm, collected, and mindful their loved ones, their company, and their government must be doing everything in their power to find them. Notice I don’t say ‘cool’, calm, and collected because it is near 100 degrees in their subterranean oven and it looks it. The 33 may be the closest an audience ever comes to seeing smell because it looks like a claustrophobic, noxious nightmare all the way down there in the pit.
The 33 is not about process. It’s not about the drills, machines, and physics of how engineers dug through a mountain to save their fellow man. It’s about the men themselves and how they came together so they may survive together. It is about their wives, children, and parents up top, who bonded to form the appropriately titled ‘Camp Hope’, because separately, despair would have taken over each and every one of them. Riggen wisely puts faith, hope, and fortitude up front drowning out the mechanics. If she had also put Chile and authenticity on the same level, The 33 would move you and remind us of the shock we all felt in 2010. Instead, we get soap opera and emotions over characterization, a recipe for a quick bite to eat, but not a meal you will remember.
Comment Box is loading comments...
