The Burning Plain 2 stars STARRING Joaquin De Almeida, Kim Basinger ‘amp; Charlize Theron DIRECTED BY Guillermo Arriaga RATED R 01:51
The Burning Plain’ opens with a trailer exploding on an empty plain in New Mexico.
Thankfully, the rest of the film is less predictable, although no easier to digest.
In a style reminiscent of his two previous hits ‘mdash; ’21 Grams’ and ‘Babel’ ‘mdash; acclaimed screenwriter and freshman director Guillermo Arriaga proceeds to untangle a sequentially jumbled knot of events that straddles past and present. Repeatedly revealing the effect before the cause, Arriaga asks the audience to sit tight for the first head-scratching 45 minutes as multiple seemingly unrelated storylines follow one another in unabashedly disjointed fragments.
We begin in New Mexico, presumably 10 years ago, where Gina (Kim Basinger), an unhappily married mother of four, engages in sexual escapades with Nick (Joaquim de Almeida), a married man. Every afternoon, the two sneak away from their families and meet up halfway at a secluded trailer. During one such adventure, the trailer goes up in flames, killing the two lovers.
Flash forward to present-day Oregon, where we meet Sylvia (Charlize Theron), a hostess at a swanky seaside restaurant who ‘mdash; despite a glowing exterior that might suggest a healthy, put-together life ‘mdash; spends her free time having meaningless sex with strangers and cutting herself. To top it off, a suspicious, unidentified man appears to be stalking her.
Confused yet?
Let’s throw in a blossoming relationship between Gina’s teenage daughter Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence) and Nick’s son Santiago (J.D. Pardo), along with a side riff about an injured crop-duster and his little girl. The result is a near two-hour ‘Degrassi’ episode covering all the tough issues from adultery and plastic surgery to teen pregnancy, self-mutilation and death.
Yes, eventually all the mysterious page-turners are explained, but only the most patient viewer will still care after being suffocated by the emotional weight of the underdeveloped characters’ failed relationships, betrayals, unrealized dreams and guilt.
The pretty bow at the end doesn’t make this melodrama any less unsettling or morose. While Arriaga is celebrated for his ability to weave a multithreaded plotline by establishing continuity between each self-contained short story, he appears to have bit off more than he can chew, often at the actors’ expense.
Theron and Basinger deliver when given the opportunity, but several scenes exhaust their heartrending potential when Arriaga snaps the viewer out of their cinematic trance in order to show off his overused splicing skills.
Save for Robert Elswit’s dreamlike cinematography, a distracting flood of bird, scar and window motifs juxtaposed with a blatant orange-versus-blue separation of past and present makes Arriaga’s latest look more like a film-school final than the work of an Oscar nominee.