Movie summary of The Burning Plain by Michael The Moviegoer
THE BURNING PLAIN = **
“Plain Is The Word”
I really wanted to love this film. It’s the directorial debut of Guillermo Arriaga, writer of three great films, “Babel,” “21 Grams” and “Amores Perros”. Each of those films had complicated inter-connected storylines presented in a fragmented non-linear fashion with engaging performances directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
It’s not that Arriaga’s direction makes his new film “The Burning Plain” so dull. He does manage to get some excellent work from his two Oscar-winning leading ladies Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger. It’s just that this time the pieces of his jigsaw puzzle-like story don’t seem that intriguing. The plot twists don’t really surprise us because we can easily fill in the blanks very early on.
It’s not that he doesn’t try to repeat the success he had with his earlier multi-story screenplays. Describing the events of “The Burning Plain” may prove trickier than simply watching the film. But I’ll try anyway.
Kim Basinger has a husband who can’t seem to make love to her since she lost one of her breasts to cancer. So she has an affair with a married man. The two adulterers are accidentally killed in a fire at the start of the movie. So, like “21 Grams”, this story is also told in flashbacks and flashforwards leaving us to determine which is which. Basinger’s teenage daughter and her lover’s teenage son meet at their funeral and soon begin to have their own affair complete with self-mutilation. The girl gets pregnant but abandons her baby with the father soon after she’s born. Charlize Theron plays Basinger’s grown daughter in the later scenes, which means the two Oscar winners share no screen time together.
Technically, the film is well-made. It looks great and the performances are top-notch. I just didn’t love Arriaga’s story this time around. After his first three screenplays, this one just felt a little, well, plain.
DVD Double-Feature: A fine example of one of Arriaga’s better screenplays is “21 Grams”. Naomi Watts loses her husband and two daughters in a hit-and-run car accident. Sean Penn, badly in need of a heart transplant, gets her husband’s heart. Penn then searches for Watts and has an affair with her. Then they plan to find and kill the hit-and-run driver played by Benicio Del Toro. It’s a deep, dark and depressing drama, but these actors do some of the best work of their careers. And the story is told all out-of-order in fragments, but it’s surprisingly easy to follow.
Michael The Moviegoer
