The Burning Plain

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Sep. 15, 2009

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Sometimes even a critic with a word quota has to honor the old war horse about saying nothing—or at least very little—if one has nothing nice to say. And while Guillermo Arriaga—the screenwriter behind Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel—is, according to trailers and articles, “acclaimed,” he’s considered quite the opposite in the circles in which I travel.

No, we do not dig his pointless plays with time, hopping around various storylines in a desperate attempt to cover up soap opera blandness. (21 Grams appears to have been edited on Shuffle.) Nor do we jibe with his facile commentary on how we’re all connected in this vast global village of ours.

So far he’s been able to nab directors who give his films some necessary frisson: Alejandro González Iñárritu, who directed the three mentioned above, is a pretty good sensualist, while Tommy Lee Jones, who helmed Arriaga’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, gave a clumsy script some loopy Tommy Lee Jones-ness. Now that he’s “broken up” with Iñárritu, Arriaga lights out on his own with The Burning Plain, which brings us his vision unencumbered by another major creative voice. And it’s pretty sad—Arriaga running on empty, beating a dead horse, whatever cliché you prefer.

I’d like to end it here to spare the poor guy any more of a drubbing. (A.O. Scott’s brilliant evisceration on At the Movies last week couldn’t have felt good.) But I still have about 100 words. So let’s keep this brief.

Charlize Theron plays a miserable woman who has miserable sex with just about anyone. Meanwhile Kim Basinger is a married woman having an affair with a Mexican (Joaquim de Almeida). This pisses off her teenage daughter, who kind of looks a lot like a young Charlize Theron.

How are these two connected? Are they even taking place in the same decade? And will Arriaga seriously withhold the painfully honest truth into the second hour? Of course he will, just as he will also work such Arriaga staples as one-dimensional racists, overcast sexaholics and overly noble Mexicans, one of whom barely bats an eye when Theron pays him a naked advance. A twisted sense of professional obligation kept me sitting tight, only to be rewarded with a finale that barely qualifies as trite.

But already, I’ve said too much. Dude, your shit is tired. C-

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