Like his previously scripts for the films 21 Grams, Babel and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, director Guillermo Arriaga, with The Burning Plain tells a multilayered, multidirectional story in different, interceding timelines. In a rainy, seaside town, a restaurant hostess named Sylvia (Charlize Theron) goes through her life in a daze, barely even showing signs of life during the anonymous sex she has with strange men. A million miles away, it seems, a bored housewife named Gina (Kim Bassinger) begins an affair with Nick (Joaquim de Almeida), meeting in a trailer in the middle of the desert. Elsewhere in that same or similar stretch of desert, a man and his daughter bond as he works as a crop duster, until a serious crash puts him in the hospital.
How are all these stories connected? That becomes the dominant question throughout as Arriaga slowly, but surely, ties the various pieces together for us. As a filmmaker, Arriaga seems able to engender a lot of patience, so even though you’d really like to know where it’s all going you’re still comfortable enough to sit back and let it happen. Unlike Babel, a film I was seriously ambiguous about, I found that the nature of Burning Plain, while still sprawling, was surprisingly insular. That made sense though when the interconnectivity between the various characters was shown, but I could never see the tentacles, so to speak. Though the film reaches out in many directions, you never feel lost.
However, there was still an emotional distance I think. Theron, though she’s supposed to cold and distant, did at times feel like she was putting it on rather than wearing it, if you know what I mean. In other words it felt very much like acting rather than something more realistic. Meanwhile, Bassinger is stingingly true, caught between wanting to be the dutiful wife and mother, but enjoying the tremendous emotional freedom she feels with Nick. Of course, given the fact that Gina’s husband is a typical truck driving, red meat eating hillbilly, it’s not hard to understand the appeal in the much more open and sensitive Nick, and de Almeida gets a great chance to show off some range versus his usual opportunities playing one sort of drug kingpin or another.
Another performance I really enjoyed was José María Yazpik as Carlos. First appearing as a kind of stalkerish figure, like the overall plot, he makes you wonder his direction and motivation. As he watches Sylvia you think to yourself: is he a P.I., a jealous ex. What’s his story anyway? Yazpik manages to convey creepiness, but later he channels endearing as tries to reach Sylvia and opens things up to a surprising connection between all the film’s various threads. Tessa la, who plays the little girl Maria, is also very good, and Theron acting against the girl is actually better than she is in the rest of the movie. Thinking back, there is some heavy melodrama at work here. Thank goodness then that there a lot of quality actors to carry the water.
I enjoyed the drama and I enjoyed the mystery of the fractured story, as the movie unfolds it’s incredibly engaging and engrossing. In the rearview though, one can’t help but feel there was something more average to the proceedings, like something you might see on the W Network if they could afford actors of quality like Theron and Bassinger. But performances do when out, and Arriaga shows some serious skill as a filmmaker with way he approaches the story and captures it. The setting and the atmosphere reflect the raw emotion of the film, and all the ingredients together really pull you in. This is not a perfect movie, but it’s very well done and engrossing in the moment. A promising debut to say the least.
