Movie Review - The Burning Plain

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From writer/director Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, 21 Grams) comes The Burning Plain staring Charlize Theron as Sylvia, a melancholy restaurant manager descending into a spiral of joyless sex and self-mutilation. The film revolves around the death of Gina (Kim Basinger) and Nick (Joaquim de Almeida), an adulterous couple burned to death when their rendezvous point (a singlewide trailer in the desert of New Mexico) mysteriously catches fire while they are…um…well, mid-adultery. While the couple’s children try to pick up the pieces, the couple’s spouses are left to deal with the grief of loss compounded by the anger of betrayal. The families are further scandalized upon discovering that Gina’s teenage daughter (Jennifer Lawrence) and Nick’s teenage son (J.D. Pardo) have turned their shared anguish into an affair of their own.

The Burning Plain is what most people would term an “art-house” film. It’s full of emotional torment and metaphors. And if you’ve never seen and “art-house” film before, please, I beg you…don’t start with this one. It’s everything that is wrong with those sorts of films. It’s plodding, predictable and pretentious. It’s full of actors giving it their all in a movie that’s not near as “important” as they think it is. Making matters worse is its use of a non-linear storytelling device that serves no other purpose than to make the film even more pompous.

The story is told in an exasperating, non-sequential manner with the adultery portion taking place roughly 15 years before Sylvia’s story. The film bounces back-and-forth in time with absolutely no shift in tone or texture to indicate said shift; even costuming and hairstyles give little clue as to what is occurring in the present and what isn’t. The lack of chronology (and/or indicators to distinguish transitions between periods) makes the film feel as if it were edited at random. Exacerbating the problem is the miserly distribution of plot points. The film hinges on, not one but, two separate secrets. Both of which you’ll figure out so far in advance that, by the time they’re finally revealed, you’ll be less surprised by the details of the secret than you will be by the fact that it was still considered a secret at all.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Lone Star and 1 being The Brown Bunny, The Burning Plain gets a 3.

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