At the start of “The Burning Plain,” we meet Charlize Theron’s Sylvia, a mess of sexual confusion and latent anger. We’re going to follow her as she finally takes responsibility for her emotional recklessness and in turn cleanses herself from the strife from which she came, but we’re also going to see how she came to feel this anger, resentment, and sexual dysfunction as a young girl living in the desert with selfish, unpleasant parents. That’s three subplots for those of you scoring at home. None could withstand their own movie, but here they are, jammed into the same narrative window despite none of the stories adding much depth to each other. And, oh, for added resonance, they’ve been shaken up out of chronological order to force you to reach to perceive connections between all parties involved. To writer Guillermo Arriaga (also directing for the first time)- congratulations, you’ve made the exact same movie five times in a row, you nimrod.
Charlize plays Sylvia, an unhappy restaurant hostess, trapped in a listless haze, staring off into the waves and cutting herself in a desperate attempt to feel something. Into a series of loveless affairs she enters, bored with her life and, perhaps noticing how little she has to live for, staring a little bit too much off that cliff. As she’s followed by a mysterious Mexican man who speaks no English but apparently has a GPS system built into his head, we learn her upbringing was at the hands of an actress wearing a Kim Basinger fright mask. See, Frightmask Basinger was a loving mother who nonetheless felt compelled to cheat on her husband with a hunky slab of lower working class Mexican meat, a dalliance that ended in tragedy for all involved.
Arriaga, who also wrote “Amores Perros” and “Babel,” wants to stagger the chronology in a random matter to hopefully perceive differently a conventional story of how sexualized females are punished people when it comes to their affections for Latin Heat. Except that he’s only interested in portraying the origins of certain onscreen incidents, but never fully explaining them. When we see Sylvia cutting herself as an adult, we can assume as a randy teen she picked up this particular interest. Sure enough, as a youth, she stays too close to the flame on purpose, leaving a mark that lasts forever. This doesn’t really need to be shown, but if they’re gonna show it, why not depict where it comes from, no? Oh, no, that would require storytelling, and Arriaga only knows screenwriting gimmickry. Perhaps it’s best he no longer put words in the mouths of young people- Arriaga just CANNOT resist writing children into his screenplays, despite apparently never hearing anyone under the age of 18 speak an actual human sentence. When one young character suggests going to Mexico means they can “be at peace” the other responds, “We can never be at peace again.” This character does not have a Darth in front of their name.
One of the more curious pecadillos of Arriaga’s writing career (or auteur ship, if you’re not an Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu fan) seems to be sex. Moreso in “The Burning Plain” but generally in an Arriaga script, characters, specifically women, are constantly, upsettingly punished for their sexual desires. This stems from the use of sex as a negative plot device, which suggests that Arriaga sees no joy in the essential act. It’s faithlessness, really- Arriaga would rather see the human misery and pain, but when it comes down to young physical love- even the dangerous, ill-advised type in the film- Arriaga has to keep a po-faced approach lest he depict an actual moment of serenity. Sex might be a catalyst for pain and heartbreak, but it’s also always a moment of happy release, and to rob the characters of this awareness is simply dramatic dishonesty.
The emotional anchor is Theron, and yet it’s a performance we’ve seen from her already, all bee-stung red eyes and dowry-soft skin combined with a million-mile stare. She seems to have a deal with these sadface filmmakers- “I’ll get my ya-yas out, but I’ll be crying, so you won’t enjoy it.” At this point, she’s bringing so much baggage into her heavy dramatic roles that when she’s required to be the underwritten anchor for the story and she sleepwalks it, everyone knows, and it makes it far more of a slog. We need to get her a better filmmaker. We hear Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is available. [D]