THE BURNING PLAIN
Director Guillermo Arriago (Babel, 21 Grams, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and Amores Perros) is a master of spinning multiple characters and plots and then tying them altogether in a sort of leaky mesh package. This time it’s love, betrayal and abandonment mostly on the New Mexican border.
Charlize Theron stars as Sylvia, an emotionally distant woman, living in a rainy corner of Oregon. She manages a restaurant where she sleeps with one of her kitchen staff as well as a customer, appearing to care for neither. Sylvia is so cluelessly out of it that she stares naked out of her second story window as children pass by on their way to school. Another story involves Santiago (J.D. Pardo) a young man whose father, Nick (Joaquin de Almeida) has just been killed in the midst of an affair with Gina (Kim Basinger), a lonely truck driver’s wife, left at home with 4 kids. One of those kids Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence) had slowly uncovered her mother’s betrayal, and after the deaths, begins an affair with Santiago to the great consternation of her father, Robert (Brett Cullen) as well as Santiago’s mother, Ana (Rachel Ticotin.)
It’s a stellar cast of extremely talented actors and the way in which the story unfolds is quite compelling. But it’s also tricky, very tricky to pull off broken plots, time shifting and disparate characters. Arriaga is not deliberately manipulating us into conventional who-dun-it plot, we can pretty easily figure out who is who and what happened - the clues are more like obvious statements. But the problem, I believe, maybe that the emotional core of the film is perhaps a little to cold, a little too distant. Theron, Basinger and Lawrence are playing, more or less, the same type of character with various results. Basinger is, presumably, liberated by the passionate affair she’s having however her expression never really shifts much beyond frozen and stiff. Theron is someone who can cut loose but maybe not so much when she’s not in a physical disguise, I couldn’t connect at all and maybe one of the toughest acting feats is communicating coldness and emotion simultaneously as Kate Winslet did last year in The Reader. Perhaps Lawrence, the youngest of the three, got it the best.
I certainly don’t mean to place the burden of the film on the women’s shoulders, it’s ultimately Arriaga’s film. Perhaps with less of a plot and far fewer devices and action than he’s had before, it’s harder to pull off. It may seem as if it should be the opposite but when the story is spare, the drama has to be tighter, the characters better developed and the acting more skillful. It’s not a bad film, not at all, but there is some feeling missing and it’s a film that is all about feeling.
The Burning Plain opens September 18, 2009
Written and directed by Guillermo Arriaga; produced by Walter Parkes and Laurie Macdonald; Director of Photography, Robert Elswit; edited by Craig Wood; music by Omar Rodriguez Lopez and Hans Zimmer. Released by Magnolia Pictures. Running time: 111 minutes.
With: Charlize Theron (Sylvia); John Corbett (John); Jose Maria Yazpik (Carlos); Robin tunney (Laura); J.D. Pardo (Young Santiago); Rachel Ticotin (Ana); Brett Cullen (Robert); Jennifer Lawrence (Mariana); Santiago (Danny Pino); Tessa Ia (Maria); Nick Martinez (Joaquim De Almeida); and Kim Basinger (Gina.)
