Review: ‘The Burning Plain’

Guillermo Arriaga has a hard time with chronological structure.   With screenplays like ’21 Grams,’ ‘The Three Burial of Melquiades Estrada,’ and ‘Babel’ under his belt, he appears more as a quilt-maker than a writer of film.   All of his films are made up of several, different strands connected by either some, underlying theme or overlaying event, and, in some cases, the nature of the beast is the most interesting element of the screenplay.   With ‘The Burning Plain,’ Arriaga steps behind the camera on one of his own screenplays, and, despite the film’s superb cast and lush camera-work, its heavy-handed focus and predictability end up amounting to little more than trivial drama.

Laid out in a two-prong fashion, the film follows two women, played by Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger.   Set up in nondescript times or places (specifically nondescript, the basic nature of the “where” and “when” can be sorted out early on), we jump back and forth to these two women and the lives they have set before themselves.   Theron’s Sylvia is, for all intents and purposes, a zombie, living in a gray world that seems to lack both emotional and physical feeling.   She runs a restaurant, but her personal life is ashambles, as she jumps from one man to the next, never allowing herself even the slightest bit of passion.

Basinger plays Gina, a housewife living in a small town somewhere near Mexico.   She is carrying on an affair with a Mexican local, played by Joaquim de Almeida, trying to balance her life between her family and the man she truly feels sentiment for.   It isn’t long before Gina’s teenage daughter, Mariana, catches on to her mother’s infidelities.

It isn’t hard to discover where the connect between these two stories lies.   It doesn’t even seem as if Arriaga is attempting any sense of mystery between them.   His precision of handling in allowing the bridge to reveal itself is as if done with a butcher’s knife.   Other stories that trail off from these, Mariana and a local boy years down the road and a story involving a young girl and her crop-dusting father, are a little more mysterious in their presence, but they don’t stay in hiding long.  It doesn’t matter if Arriaga intended for this lack of mystery or not.  Once you know where the story is headed, it’s just a matter of sitting back and watching it all unfold without much to spicen it up.  The last half of the film plays like watching someone else put together a jigsaw puzzle, one whose box you have in your hands so you know exactly what the finished product is going to look like.  Maybe this could have worked as a structure, but the picture we are working towards in terms of story, the quilt which Arriaga is crafting, is gray, heavy, and borders very near dullness.

Cinematographer Robert Elswit helps make the film a beautiful one to observe, thankfully.  Honing his skills on movies like ‘Good Night and Good Luck’ and ‘There Will Be Blood’ has given him the sense of color depth, and whether we are in the murky world of Sylvia, the vibrant desert of Gina, or even the seemingly chaotic patterns that form in the sorghum fields of one, particular scene, we are always amidst something beautiful.  Though the content is calloused and difficult to connect with, the worlds Elswit and Arriaga create in their shots immerse us, allowing us some kind of connect to the story, even if it is one built on style.

Everyone in the cast does their straight-path performance, no one ever really standing up and taking charge of a stand-out spotlight.  Basinger probably comes closest to grabbing the audience’s attention.  You begin feeling for her, understanding her struggles between loyalty to family and the bottled up passion she can only show to this one man.  Theron’s character probably offers the highest level of transformation, from her hard shell in the early moments to the softening of her emotions in the latter moments when someone unexpected comes back into her life.  Theron, for all of her talents, doesn’t do the best job she can in pulling this off, however.  This gives her character a sense of one-notedness, and, in the end, we question how far along she truly has come.

Keeping similar structures as his previous screenplays, Arriaga’s newest film is a more compact story, a film about the lives of only a few people instead of the world of different lives he set forth in ‘Babel.’  Unfortunately, the strokes with which he paints the story are so heavy and caked on, it becomes difficult to find our bearing within each strand.  The shots are beautiful and much of the acting is commendable, but, without a gripping story for them to surround themselves, the film ends up becoming a forgettable experiment in style over substance.  It’s heavy drama for all the wrong reasons.  Perhaps Arriaga should have jettisoned his sporadic structure for a more linear format for something so small.  This probably would have helped with the connections.