William Bibbiani Reviews The Burning Plain!
The striking poster for Guillermo Arriaga’s The Burning Plain features the following tag line: “Love Heals. Love Absolves. Love Burns.” It’s a fitting description for both genital herpes and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga’s films, which both turn up every year or two, emphasize personal regret, and, according to different experts, are either emotionally devastating or reasonably inconsequential. Like many of Arriaga’s previous films, mostly directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (21 Grams, Babel), The Burning Plain features a strong cast of talented actors portraying characters in various degrees of suffering and the film jumps around time and space in a convoluted attempt to explain their (interesting but not terribly complicated) back stories in an engaging way.
Charlize Theron stars as Sylvia, an emotionally damaged woman who has meaningless sex and cuts herself just to feel something. After her introduction, the film (get ready for it…) jumps around time and space, following a motherless girl (Tessa Ia) on a quest to find her mother, two star-crossed teenagers from opposite sides of the tracks (Jennifer Lawrence and J.D. Pardo), and a couple of happy middle-aged lovers (Kim Basinger and Joaquim de Almeida) who are married, but unhappily and to other people. All of these actors and more deliver believable performances that keep the film from becoming mired in tedious melodrama – Kim Basinger’s performance is quite simply the best of her career – but they are failed by Arriaga’s storytelling, which despite capable direction has become repetitive and predictable.
Charlize Theron’s character has difficulty looking back, as illustrated here.
Arriaga attempts to connect these disparate dots over the course of the film, but the dots are clearly numbered for any audience member paying moderate attention. We’re introduced to Charlize Theron as a troubled woman in her 30’s, and then introduced to Jennifer Lawrence, a teenager who looks an awful lot like Charlize Theron who goes through emotional turmoil. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that Lawrence plays a young Theron, but Arriaga seems to think it is, going so far as to suddenly start using their characters’ names repeatedly in the second act to point out that they are different, only to later reveal that – Gasp! – Charlize Theron changed her name! It’s an awkward attempt to turn a character’s back story into a revelation and almost seems to indicate a lack of faith in his material. Gambling on an audience’s short attention span is all well-and-good for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, but The Burning Plain is an art house movie for art house audiences, most of whom actually expect to be intellectually engaged by the film, and Arriaga’s script tips its hand far too often for its mysteries to have any impact. Like 21 Grams and Babel (but especially 21 Grams), it sometimes feels like far more effort has gone into making the structure interesting than into the story Arriaga uses the structure to tell.
Perhaps most frustrating is the ending of the film, which I will not reveal here, but suffice it to say that after finally revealing his characters’ entire back stories, the actual plotline occurring in the present never achieves proper closure. Unanswered questions are not in-and-of-themselves a cardinal sin of storytelling, provided that the actual story is told. Lost in Translation, for example, tells a complete story but allows the audience to question or even decide for themselves what Bill Murray actually says at the end. In contrast, imagine the ending of The Burning Plain as a lot like The Silence of the Lambs, if the credits had rolled as soon as Clarice pieced together the identity of Buffalo Bill and said “Freeze!” The film takes us all the way to the confrontation we’ve been anticipating for the entire film (if you’ve been paying attention) or an hour (if you haven’t), and then stops, which probably seemed really clever on paper but there is so much drama that could have been mined from the final scene that the film I was going to declare, dispassionately, “Guillermo Arriaga’s Best Movie” fell back to second place behind The (problematic but still satisfying) Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
Kim Basinger gives the finest performance of her career (and Joaquim de Almeida is always good).
But all this is praising with moderate damnation. In some weird respects, reviewing a Guillermo Arriaga movie is a lot like reviewing a Michael Bay movie. If you like his earlier stuff you’ll like this too and no amount of critical analysis is going to change that. It is frustrating, however, to watch such an obviously talented screenwriter take the reins of his own film and bring so very little new to the table. Had Inarritu’s name been mistakenly given as the director of The Burning Plain, I doubt very much that anyone would have guessed otherwise (which isn’t so much “good” or “bad” as an observation). As it stands, Arriaga’s film is beautifully acted and well-shot, and that may be enough for some audience members to overlook The Burning Plain’s flaws and become invested in its good intentions. Those of us who expect more will find it very plain indeed.
The Burning Plain, written and directed by Academy Award-nominee Guillermo Arriaga (Babel), stars Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger, Joaquim de Almeida, Jennifer Lawrence and J.D. Pardo. It opens in theaters September 18, 2009 from 2929 Productions and Magnolia Pictures.
