by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was The 33, a quite remarkable 2015 movie about the Chilean
mine disaster in 2010: 33 miners were trapped thousands of feet below ground in
a mountain outside Copiapó, Chile after a mountain that had been continuously
mined for gold and copper since 1889 became dangerously unstable and finally collapsed.
It took a rescue crew from the Chilean government (which intervened when the
mine’s private owner immediately bailed out and denied either responsibility or
any resources to help their workers) and some international help 17 days to get
a drill through the so-called “Refuge,” a safety enclosure within the mountain
to which the miners retreated after the accident, so they could get fresh air,
food and water to the trapped men. But that was only the beginning of the
rescue: it took nearly two months more before they were able to drill a hole in
the mountain large enough actually to evacuate the men. In the meantime the
men lived on whatever supplies could be lowered to them through the little hole
they had dug, including water and liquid food supplied by NASA (because after
17 days of starvation their stomachs could no longer handle solid food). Teams
from three other countries — the U.S., Canada and Brazil — all came to Chile to
drill the necessary hole in the mountain through which the men could be brought
out, but the Canadian and Brazilian crews bailed out and the U.S. crew hit a
snag when a part of their drill bit broke inside the hole and they had to use a
powerful magnet to get it out again so they could put on a new bit and keep
drilling. (According to an imdb.com “Goofs” contributor, that wasn’t how it
really happened: “They did not use a magnet to get the broken drill bit out. In
fact they had to manufacture on site what they call a spider drill. It had a
open spiral teeth design at the end of the drill, to try to surround the bit.
Using the pressure of the down force, the teeth would collapse on itself [sic]
and capture the drill bit.”)
Eventually the large hole reached the miners on
the 69th day of their captivity, and the Chilean government supplied
a rescue capsule called the “Fenix-2” which could bring the miners out again —
but only one at a time, and the final suspense was whether the mountain could
hold together long enough for the Fenix-2 to get all 33 miners out before it
collapsed again or shifted enough to cover up or shrink the hole. There’s a
scene in the movie in which the man who emerges as the leader of the 33 trapped
miners, Mario Sepúlveda (Antonio Banderas, thoroughly deglamorized and
excellent in the role), is reported to have cut a book deal with a publisher
for a major advance — and the other 32 naturally resent that he’s going to be
the only one to profit from their collective misery. (In fact, the 33 miners
cut a deal that they would share equally in the fees for any retelling of their
story.) A final title in the film reveals that the mining company was found not
guilty of criminal negligence and therefore the miners didn’t get any
compensation for their ordeal from the company or the government — which
figures. The 33 was directed by
Patricia Riggen from a committee-written script — the writing credits list José
Rivera for the story and Mikko Alanne, Craig Borten and Michael Thomas for the
script, and while he isn’t credited in the film imdb.com lists Hector Tobár as
the author of the book on which it was based — and turned out to be an
excellent movie that avoided the two traps inherent in filming a story like
this: making it too dark and dreary, or going the other way and making it too
treacly and sentimental.
The 33
evokes comparison to The Hurt Locker,
another film directed by a woman about men in tough, life-threatening
circumstances, but whereas Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal didn’t give us any
important woman characters, Riggen and her committee of writers created a rich,
powerful fabric by alternating between the plight of the miners underground and
the encampment their families — including María Segovia (Juliette Binoche),
whose younger brother was one of the trapped miners and who survives herself by
making empanadas and selling them
on the street (in an opening scene she comes upon her brother catching some
last bits of sleep before he descends into the mine for his workday, and leaves
him two empanadas which he leaves behind), and who becomes the lead spokeswoman
for the families once the disaster happens — create above ground to wait for
their men to be rescued and to pressure the government to mount a rescue
effort. The rescue is ordered by Chilean President Piñera (Bob Gunten), depicted
as a cynical old opportunist who doesn’t want to spend the money on a rescue
effort but also doesn’t want his government to look bad in the eyes of the
world by not trying to save the
miners. He sends his minister of mining, Laurence Golborne (Rodrigo Santoro),
to supervise the project and assigns him a mining expert, Carlos Mamani (Tenoch
Huerta), to run it on the ground. There’s some nice byplay between the crusty
old guy and the young whippersnapper over how to do the rescue and in
particular how to handle the problem of “diversion,” where because of things in
the substrata you can’t see from above the drill goes off course and doesn’t
end up where you want it to, though it’s Golborne who hits on the rather
obvious idea of compensating for the diversion by drilling in what seems like
the “wrong” place, only the diversion will send the drill where it really
belongs. The 33 is a great film
that works on nearly every level — about the only flaw I found in it were the
Frito Bandito accents with which the Chilean characters speak English to
establish their “Latin Americanicity” (apparently the DVD offers an option to
allow you to watch the film with a Spanish soundtrack), and even that objection
faded away as the film continued and I got into the story.
It’s an
intrinsically powerful tale but also one that could have become hideously
botched in the execution — as the film Deepwater Horizon, also about a major accident in an extraction
industry, did — and it’s an unusually successful movie in that it uses a number
of major actors (the ones cited above and also Lou Diamond Phillips as the mine
foreman — seeing him old gave Charles the same
he’s-so-much-older-so-what-does-that-make-me? feeling I’d had watching the 52-year-old Jason
Patric in the Lifetime movie The Girl in the Bathtub the night before) but successfully deglamorizes them
so they fit into their parts and become part of an ensemble cast instead of
sticking out like the usual sore thumbs. One would have thought this film would
have been Patricia Riggen’s ticket to a major directorial career — but the film
industry, which is a lot less
progressive than it likes to pretend, hasn’t given her the big feature-film
assignments that would seem to be her due after The 33. Her only subsequent credits are something called Miracles
from Heaven (about a mother with a
10-year-old daughter suffering from a fatal disease — according to the synopses
on imdb.com it’s another story
about a woman pushing the authorities into an incredible rescue attempt), three
episodes on the Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series (so once again, as with Kathryn Bigelow, a woman director is
forced to “make her bones” with a story about macho males!), a series she’s producing called Presumed
Innocent and two TV-movies, Run
for Your Life and Surveillance. The 33
evoked comparisons with Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Ace in the Hole (also about a rescue of a man trapped underground,
but a much more cynical and depressing film with an unhappy ending — not
surprising given who the director and co-writer was) and also the 1954
Left-wing indie Salt of the Earth (notably
in the scenes of the women forming a community and confronting the authorities
when their men are prevented from doing so) — but on its own merits it’s a
fascinating film and a major work that presents a story that would seem to be
sure-fire but could have been screwed up in many ways Riggen and her writers
avoided (and this is one movie that contradicts my general-field theory of
cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of
writers!).
