Screened Out – The 33

[three-star-rating]Antonia Banderas, Lou Diamond Phillips, Rodrigo Santoro, Juliette Binoche, Maria Bello, Gabriel Byrne, James Brolin[/three-star-rating]

In 2010, the world waited with bated breath as 33 Chilean miners were trapped underground. Reports of them came daily and even hourly. Television and print exposed us to their terrible working conditions and impoverished lives. We asked, would the ground keep shifting? Did anyone die? Would they get out?

The 33 has that obviously riveting, dramatic story at its core. It also often delves into a nifty, gritty filmic language. Unfortunately, the script is buried under miles of cliché and grandstanding speeches. One starts to doubt the veracity, the story is told with so much melodrama.

Workers in mines around the world are daily exposed to dangerous situations and unregulated safety violations. Over 12,000 die every year. The poor miners know the risks; we know them, too. This crappy, economic situation has been explored in other flicks like Blood Diamonds.

What’s fascinating about The 33 is that these men lived together underground, trapped. They fended off starvation and mental distress. They located water. They decided who would lead them and how they would conduct themselves. They all hoped the people aboveground cared enough to dig for them.

Thank the Heavens they have the saintly, young Minister of Mining – played by the handsome Santoro. He spouts some platitudes and convinces the Chilean president and the mining company to show some morality. He manages the media, he provides for the families, and he works to get help from the Canadians, Australians, and Americans.

Underground, there is another superhuman (Banderas) who becomes the miners’ ersatz leader. With Whitman-like panache, he rallies his coworkers. He keeps them from killing each other. He has the key to the limited food supply.

This is director Patricia Riggen’s biggest project to date. (She directed the charming, light immigration flick cliché Under the Same Moon.) Riggen shows some beautiful cinematic style in the camps of the desert around the mine. She really shines in the claustrophobic, labyrinthine, and nerve-wracking world underground.

However, there are six or seven tense incidents that feel completely made up – a frustrating quality in a biopic. Most things seems too tight and cliché.

Not one climactic moment can pass without a showy monologue. In any dramatic film, eloquent speeches should be earned, and they should be sparse. All this showboating cheapens a film about real, common people. A braver, more honest movie would’ve trusted that the audience doesn’t need melodrama; the situation itself is intriguing enough.

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The acting – all in English with various successes and failures at Chilean accents – chews scenery like the drill bits chew rock. As talented as they are, Binoche or Byrne should’ve never attempted these accents.

The script does do one thing right; it doesn’t tell all 33 men’s stories. It chooses six or seven to focus on at various levels. They stand for every man in the Chilean mine, just as this real-life situation represented all people trapped in unfair, unsafe situations around the world. It takes a tragedy for us to pay attention.