Lou Diamond Phillips and Antonio Banderas (Warner Bros. Pictures)Call it sympathy for a good international cause, but I don’t quite mind that Antonio Banderas, Lou Diamond Phillips, Gabriel Byrne, and Juliette Binoche all play Chileans in director Patricia Riggen’s The 33. Based on the true story of the men trapped for over three months in a collapsed gold and copper mine in Chile, the film is a solid rescue thriller as well as a real-life variation on the kind of ensemble picture about a group coming together from all walks of life.
Of course, that template can go in one of two directions: a classic like Stagecoach, or a campy disaster like Airport 1975 – The Concorde. The 33 falls somewhere in the dignified middle, though perhaps too dignified to generate dramatic explosions.
As suits a film about people of many nations uniting for a common cause, it opens with an Elvis impersonator. At a mining company picnic, we meet the men slated to descend into the ill-fated mine, including Elvis impersonator Edison Pena (Jacob Vargas). Elvis is one of only a handful of miners whose stories are fleshed out, however minimally. Another is Dario Segovia (Juan Pablo Raba), who we find sleeping on a park bench. His estranged sister Maria (Juliette Binoche, whose native accent occasionally comes through) makes and sells empanadas in the neighborhood, and leaves a few for her brother to find when he wakes up. Too proud to accept her handouts, he leaves them behind, though soon he will long for his sister’s home-made sustenance.
Before the miners descend into the earth, Don Lucho (Phillips) confronts the mining company owner, who doesn’t want to lose a day’s work just because the mountain seems to be shifting inside. Don Lucho is the foreman on the shift that goes down, so he is caught with his fellow miners. The others blame the company, not him, for sending them down in the face of danger and for not providing an alternate exit.
If you don’ t remember the details of the miners’ ordeal, you may wonder about early scenes where the miners ration out food and wonder how they will survive another week, much less the 69 days they would end up spending before rescue. Personalities emerge from the depths, including Mario Sepulveda, who must have been thrilled when he learned that his big-screen counterpart would be Antonio Banderas.
The movie strikes perhaps too fair a balance between the drama unfolding in the bowels of the earth and the drama of the rescue attempts (and the growing media circus) above, partially spearheaded by engineer André Sougarret (Byrne). The dramatic potential of the miners’ closed quarters doesn’t reach the claustrophobic intensity you might imagine, but an episode of magic realism does set in when the miners have a kind of collective hallucination of a Last Supper where all is set right.
It’s the only moment when the film seems to wander off the standard issue ripped-from-the-headlnes script. Still, the miners survived, and all 33 appear in an epilogue to the film. A postscript notes that the mining company was cleared of all charges and that the miners were never compensated, a situation that continues in the wake of the film. Nine of the miners sued their lawyers for cheating them out of profits from the film. The 33 extracts a narrative out of real crisis, but the repercussions of that crisis still seem to be buried in a mountain of damaged lives that a single movie couldn’t hope to make real sense of.
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The 33
Directed by Patricia Riggen
Written by Mikko Alanne, Craig Borten and Michael Thomas, based on a book by Hector Tobar
With Antonio Banderas, Lou Diamond Phillips, Juliette Binoche
Rated PG-13 for a disaster sequence and some language
127 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you
