REVIEW: The Burning Plain

LITTLE ROCK — If you were one of those people who were put off by the shattered chronologies and intertwining narratives of the three films directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga - namely Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) - you probably shouldn’t bother with The Burning Plain. You’ll likely find it baffling and confounding, needlessly convoluted and baroque.

But if you - like me - genuinely loved those films, then you may find something in Arriaga’s directorial debut to like. I liked it even as I recognized its weaknesses, even though I found some of it implausible if not impossible. It picks up a lot of the same themes as those Inarritu films, probably because Arriaga is the sort of writer who tends to worry old wounds, preferring to freshen the pain rather than forget it. It lacks whatever Inarritu brought to those movies - something like a joyful playfulness to leaven the dolefulness of Arriaga’s literary vision.

I asked Arriaga once, point blank, why he shuffled his stories up and presented them out of sequence. He said he wrote that way because it is how the stories came to him, as discrete episodes that only began to coalesce in the third act. OK, if that’s how they come, that’s how they come - but as a writer, and as a director, Arriaga should be able to shape them into something less puzzling than this film.

I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense. It does, eventually. Only that, unlike those other movies, I couldn’t see any reason for the scrambling of the timeline here. There’s less discipline in this movie; it’s not as sharply defined. Arriaga may have felt that he was the true auteur behind those Inarritu movies, but the evidence of The Burning Plain is that he’s a better novelist than director.

Still, there are some heroic performances in the movie, a couple of which have enhanced degrees of difficulty because two actors play the same character at different times in their lives. Charlize Theron plays an upscale restaurant manager in Oregon who’s medicating herself with sex; Kim Basinger is a New Mexico mother marooned in a physically bereft marriage. Young Jennifer Lawrence (who was very good in Lori Petty’s directorial debut, the almost unseen The Poker House) is a link between these two women - saying more might rob the film of some of its undeniable power.

Almost oppressively sorrowful, The Burning Plain is a tough movie to watch, though some of the more melodramatic scenes might invite some unintended comedy.

Cinematographer Robert Elswit uses extreme wide shots to establish a sense of isolation, giving us a sense ofthe characters as incidental figures, inconsequential in the larger scheme. Even the natural beauty of the landscape works to negate the humanity it contains - we see puny humans, fretting and strutting and only sometimes connecting beneath a great and stunning sky.

The Burning Plain87 Cast: Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger, Jennifer Lawrence, J.D. Pardo, John Corbett Director: Guillermo Arriaga Rating: R for sexuality, nudity and language Running time: 111 minutes