Buried Treasure, a movie by Jeff Galfer and Leslie Hope.

Buried Treasure, a film by Jeff Galfer and Leslie Hope.

The popular reification of the male mid-life crisis is the hot red sports car. As the modern, middle class man approaches middle age, it is said, he takes a look at the amount of time allotted him by his DNA and lifestyle and implacable fate, or whatever else it is that he thinks controls his comings and goings, and he panics. What has he done with his life? Why did he not take up skydiving or cave diving, or just diving into something a little more risky than double AA bonds? Why didn't he make love to that blonde who lived down the hall when he was twenty-seven and not yet married? Well, damn it, there is still some time left. There is still some gas in the tank. And there is the red sports car zooming around the curves in the commercials.
But what if death itself, rather than the mere pungent whiff of mortality, were to intervene, precipitating the crisis? Not his own death, but that of the woman he loves?
Life is a merry-go-round, a carousel in a microwave. That's the image that we get of our hero Mark's existence in the first shot of Buried Treasure, a thirty-two-minute-long feature written by and starring Jeff Galfer, directed by Leslie Hope.
Mark's life is an autopiloted cycle that makes a hamster wheel seem as though it would be meaningful. His job appears to consist of listening to his boss Jerry (Gregg Henry) hypochondriacally diagnose himself with yet another hernia, followed by a game of Hot-Cold for plastic dinnerware. (They are tax accountants, evidently. The idle season lasts forever for accountants.) Mark eats frozen Lean Cuisine at home and at the office, wrapped around a stop at an otherwise empty diner for an equally tasteless salad supper. Other than his boss, the waitress is the only other person with whom he has any contact. His schlep from home to office and from office to home is robotic, annotated by the GPS in his car. His house is barren, the pile of unopened mail the principal sign of occupancy. He lives out of boxes, the house being but a larger one. He doesn't sleep, or if he does, it is while sitting fully dressed in a chair or hanging from an inversion table. And even so, he has three alarm clocks. His suits are as brownly dull as his life.
It isn't until almost five minutes into the movie that we get a hint of the cause of his surrender to bleakness. We are suddenly pulled into Mark's memories of his wife. Or is it a fantasy? An idyll of a sleepwalker? No, it is memory. A haunting.
Mark's programming breaks down only when his car's computer suffers a crash, forcing Mark to divert, literally, from the well-worn way. He pulls into a gas station. He ignores the station attendant's attempts to converse. It is only when Mark wordlessly, without any noticeable gesture, sends out the signal that he wants to use the restroom, that we see a hint that there is more going on than a rest stop.
In the restroom, Mark, attracted to the gurgling of the toilet tank, removes the lid and finds a small plastic box floating in the water. In it is a Matchbox 1979 metallic red Corvette. The transformative and metaphorical crisis has arrived. With it is a note: "My first toy. Boy did I love this thing."
The attendant tells him of the reason that the toy car was concealed in the toilet tank. The attendant is part of a subculture of geocachers, who hide things and then post the GPS coordinates, so that others can find them. "Why?" Mark asks. Mark knows nothing of the hunt, and had found the toy by accident. Why? The attendant explains that it is in some manner a way to leave something of himself for others to find. A bid for immortality. The little red car that defies time, age, death. In a pivotal moment, sensing Mark's aimlessness, the attendant gives Mark the car. (And Mark gives it to his boss, who seems to need it.)
From there, Mark becomes alive again, even if he doesn't quite know it yet. In his otherwise empty garage is a box of things he can't classify. A couple of scarves, a flower-patterned collapsible umbrella with a silver-toned handle, photos. And a crayon drawing that he and his wife had made. Mark has a purpose now. He gathers things that his wife left behind, including a large, unfinished bottle of prescription painkillers, and packs them in a suitcase.
Driving to the desert, Mark leaves his car, and walks out into the sand with a shovel and the suitcase. At first, we think that he is going to bury the suitcase. Then we get the gut punch: He is about to commit suicide. But it is here that the transformation is completed. He leaves behind everything, except the umbrella and his underwear, building a shrine to his one treasure, the memory of his first date with his wife, for others to find. And they do, hiking across the desert, each person leaving a message, if only in the form of a lipstick lip imprint on the back of the drawing.
Life isn't a closed loop. The road goes on. You don't need the little red sports car to take you where that road leads. You can just walk.