Movie review: The 33 trapped in a cave-in

By Jay Stone

The trouble is signaled early in The 33, a drama about trapped miners. We’re at a garden party in Chile celebrating the coming retirement of one of them. Another talks about his wife’s pregnancy. The host, Mario (Antonio Banderas) can’t keep his hands off his attractive wife. When, the next day, they all hop into a truck for a one-hour drive to the bottom of the gold mine where they work, you know they’re headed for trouble: men with pregnant wives, with loving wives, with only a few days to go before retirement, are the cinematic hallmarks of impending disaster.

In fact, we know there’s going to be trouble before the film even starts. The 33 is based on a real-life mine collapse in 2010 when 33 miners were trapped underground, with limited food, for many weeks. The rescue efforts were broadcast on worldwide TV, and the men became celebrities for a while.

The film, based on Hector Tobar’s book Deep Dark Down, is considerably less riveting. For one thing, we know what’s going to happen, which makes the movie a two-hour exercise in patience. It’s an admirable effort in many ways — watching the miners come to terms with their predicament and the efforts above ground to drill 2,000 feet into the room where they lived — but it’s much like the experience of being a child listening to a bedtime story for the second time. The familiar beats of the tale are comforting, rather than galvanizing, because we know what’s coming.

In addition, The 33 comes with an instant air of artificiality because everyone speaks English with Spanish accents, in the manner of old war movies that had similar collections of characters — each of whom is allowed a single trait — thrown together in crisis.

Director Patricia Riggen (Girl In Progress) moves back and forth from underground to the surface to follow two simultaneous dramas. Down below, Mario has become the leader of the miners, rationing the limited food — emergency supplies were skimpy, and the mine owners didn’t furnish the pit with such essentials as ladders on which the men could have climbed to the surface — and keeping the peace. When the men squabble or try to eat food that must be saved, Mario rises up as a force of heroic common sense, and Banderas adds some majesty to what is mostly an undistinguished group.

Riggen finds more excitement up top. In the 1951 film Ace in the Hole, Billy Wilder turned a mine disaster into critique of a predatory media, and there’s a touch of that in The 33, but mostly it’s a conventional — not to say stereotyped — conflict. The families of the trapped miners are mostly represented by Juliette Binoche, of all people, who plays Maria, a seller of empanadas on the streets of Copiapo, a fiction that pretty well finishes any claims The 33 has to documentary-like realism. (Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, playing a South American engineer, comes a close second.) Maria’s brother is one of the miners, and there’s meant to be a subplot about how they have drifted apart over the years — he’s one of those alcoholic miners who sleeps on park benches between gigs in the pit — but it’s lost in the general atmospherics.

Maria seems to be around mostly so she can be attracted to Laurence Golborne (Brazilian heartthrob Rodrigo Santoro, who was Xerxes in 300.) Golborne is the new minister of mines, and he is credited with insisting that there be a rescue effort at all. His care and concern leave him unshaven, with his tie fetchingly loosened, as he struggles to co-ordinate the many drillers, engineers and other experts. By the end, Maria has softened so much that she gives him a complimentary empanada, which may be some sort of euphemism.

By the end, Maria has softened so much that she gives him a complimentary empanada, which may be some sort of euphemism.

The comic relief in The 33 is represented by a miner who has two women — a wife and a mistress — who fight over who gets to attend the vigil outside the mine gates. Both women could afford to lose a couple of pounds, to be frank, so their wrestling matches have a slapstick element that counteracts the dark warnings about how “there’s less than one-per-cent chance of finding them” and other premonitions of disaster.

Like that children’s story, The 33 ends the way we want it to: it’s a build-up to an emotional climax for which we’ve paid our 12 bucks. That, and seeing Banderas with no shirt on, not to mention the sight of Binoche in one of those native Chilean hats that looks like a mini-fedora. In its own way, it’s as riveting as a mine disaster.

THE EX-PRESS, November 12, 2015

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