Conceived well before Slate’s Forrest Wickman would argue against subtlety, The 33 could be a poster child for his essay: here’s a film that doesn’t beat around the bush, even when the leader of the trapped miners, Mario “Super Mario” Sepulveda (Antonio Banderas), tells his men, “that’s the heart of the mountain boys, she finally broke.” The 33 is an English-language reeling of the 2010 mining incident that trapped 33 miners 2,300 feet underground, below a rock the size the Empire State Building. However, sanitized for Hollywood, a harrowing, real-life story does not always make a good film.
Opening in the great tradition of life-shaking ensemble event films occurring in small towns, with a BBQ we’re introduced to our men and their families — well, we are introduced to some of our men. Certain personalities take center stage while others are credited in the film as Miners #1-23. Making an ensemble drama about 33 men and their families would be an ambitious undertaking even for prestige TV. In a 127-minute film it would be nearly impossible unless you’re working in documentary or an experimental form. But that is is not this movie — here is a film that’s “Hollywood” in the worst sense of the word.
For starts, inspired by Hector Tobar’s book Deep Down Dark, the film credits three screenwriters working in English and an international cast that includes the obviously not Latino Juliette Binoche, Bob Gunton, Naomi Scott and Gabriel Byrne putting on distracting Chilean accents. Perhaps on stage, a venue where subtlety doesn’t play as well as it does on screen, this might have worked.
Certain personalities of this tragedy both above and below surface become the real stars of this drama, with Banderas as the de facto leader of the 33 simply because he has the good sense to ration supplies until contact is made. Rodrigo Santoro plays Laurence Golborne, the minister of mining who appears to be a political appointee that’s forced to step up to the plate, while Gunton plays Chilean president Sebastian Pinera in a piece of casting that’s comically distracting. Also distracting is Irish actor Gabriel Byrne as the Chilean engineer whose tactics fail until Laurence steps up to offer the kind of perspective only an outsider can.
The material here is perhaps too complex to take on in a two-hour film. Interesting stories are reduced to extras and the men that do get stories, including the guy with a kid on the way, a miner with kidney problems, an engineer, and a guy with a wife and mistress, aren’t well developed. During all these developments down below, Juliette Binoche plays Maria Segovia, who becomes a leading activist in the drama on surface.
Director Patricia Riggen handles action and technical aspects of the story well, yet the screenplay lacks subtlety and nuance, from the engineer who warns the mountain is shifting before the miners head into work that fateful day to a president who wants to cautiously intervene in operations of a private mining concern. It is all on the nose, easily accessible and lacking any sort of sophistication – but what a harrowing story it is. The 33 could have been a true tear-jerker and I believe a Chilean filmmaker working with a cast of non-actors will get it right in due time. This Hollywood treatment is more suited for a movie of the week than the big screen, even if the story has an undeniable emotional impact. Wickman’s essay decries that all good art has to be challenging: this isn’t good art or great storytelling, so much as it is a great story told in an odd, mishandled way.
The 33 is now in wide release.