The Burning Plain

The Burning Plain

106 Minutes

Time shifting, interwoven character drama in which multiple divergent storylines unite into a coherent whole, is the main feature of the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu and longtime ex-collaborator Guillermo Arriaga. Together, the men refined the structure in Amores Perros and 21 Grams; regrettably, its power and effectiveness diminished in Babel, the film that irreparably fractured their relationship. Arriaga’s writing is characterized by complicated time shift narratives, ambitiously semi-mystical themes and a predilection for neatly linking seemingly-disparate story elements into a tight-knit dramatic whole. However, it’s worth mentioning that Arriaga’s best script to date, for Tommy Lee Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, managed to discard these non-linear games and tell its terrific story straight. In The Burning Plain, Arriaga’s first film as writer-director, he’s back to his old contrived tricks. With Plain the form can be pronounced to be, if not officially dead, on its last bit of life support. An offshoot of a mode popularized by Robert Altman and others, what once seemed like a fresh and exciting method of storytelling has become tired.

A trailer explodes in the desert and the two lovers inside are barbecue, and the following 45 minutes toy with the viewer as various storylines are set up. Charlize Theron is Sylvia, owner of a fancy Portland, Oregon restaurant and a mess of sexual confusion and latent anger; jumping from one man to another while a mysterious third (José Maria Yazpik) follows her across town. In another subplot set in New Mexico, Gina, a married housewife with four kids (Kim Basinger) has an affair with Nick (Joaquim de Almeida), a married father and struggles to conceal her errant behavior from her family. In the third subplot, Gina’s eldest daughter (Jennifer Lawrence) strikes up a friendship with Nick’s son Santiago (J.D. Pardo), drawn to each other as they try to deal with their parents’ infidelity. In the fourth, a 12-year old girl watches as her crop duster father crashes his plane while on the job. Arriaga’s script moves backwards and forwards in time, crossing generations and frontiers at will; events unwind and blend together in a way that stretches credulity long past its breaking point and ends up heavy on symbolism and melodrama but empty on ideas.

Arriaga hits a one-tone register throughout: sheer misery. From the angst-ridden Sylvia to Gina’s somber affair the entire film unfolds in a cloud of depression, overloaded with crying and forced dramatics that prove so overbearing they come across as manipulative rather than earned. Arriaga resorts far too often to hack soap opera tricks to move things along and if the story was told in a linear fashion, it would be just an unremarkable string of punishingly hammy events. The emotional anchor is Theron, and yet it’s a performance we’ve seen from her already, all bee-stung red eyes and soft skin combined with a million-mile stare. Basinger is both tragic and infuriating as the wife shutting out her family while having a passionate affair, but because we never find out why or how Nick and Gina meet or why they’re drawn into a love affair that leads to such tragic consequences, the affair feels like nothing more than a contrived vehicle for moving the story forward.

In addition to the influx of vapid emotion, Arriaga’s direction is hampered by its total absence of naturalism, as realized in the characters’ tendency for acting as dictated by the plot rather than their deeply felt motivations. Much of Plain seems driven by the wishes of a storyteller on a desperate quest for cross-generational lyricism, for promulgating the sort of heightened connections of a fable at the expense of those derived organically. The imagery spirals overboard, literalizing what should remain abstract, while the camera lingers too long on intense, misty-eyed close-ups.

Yet Arriaga successfully steeps the extramarital affair at the heart of the film with a strong sense of the destructive inevitability of such undertakings. From the dusty side roads on which they meet and the abandoned trailer in which they carry out their affair, to the inconvenient moments in which they’re drawn together, it’s clear that the pair risks all for these clandestine consummations of their love. The material demands the tempering of Arriaga’s penchant for multi-part storytelling and the forgoing of the age-old “sins of the parent visited on the child” conceit. It’s easy to recognize that the heart of Plain is the story of two adults with separate lives driven together on a path to destruction. How could Arriaga have missed that?

Arriaga has not embarrassed himself due to his writing, but as a director, he has a lot to learn before he can match Iñárritu’s cinematic verve. There’s nothing here to compare with Iñárritu’s spectacular set-pieces, like the opening 10 minutes of Amores Perros. Arriaga’s film is engrossing at times, however, it remains an elaborate writing exercise with few emotional hooks, and after four movies of the same ole same ole, it seems like he has nothing new to say and it feels like big step backwards.

by Teri Carson