Kim Basinger and Charlize Theron are mother and daughter. In the days of Damon Runyon, they would be charitably characterized as "having round heels." Today, in "The Burning Plain," they're more than a little mixed up. And so is Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote and directed a film that bounces around in time and place and characterization to the point where it almost defies description.
Arriaga is making his first film as a director, so perhaps he deserves a little slack, but he has written far better screenplays that have been directed by others, like Tommy Lee Jones for the fascinating "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," or Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu for the intense "21 Grams."
Theron, as Sylvia, is running an expensive restaurant in Oregon, staring moodily at the surf and having sex frequently with men she obviously doesn't care for. Suddenly we're in New Mexico, years earlier, where Basinger is living with a husband and three children and meeting Nick (Joaquim de Almeida) in a battered trailer for sex. She isn't very careful about the affair and her adolescent daughter, played with charm, grace and adolescent confusion by Jennifer Lawrence, is suspicious. Suddenly, the trailer blows up, and Basinger and DeAlmeida become-I wish we could put this more delicately-toast.
And then Basinger's daughter (Lawrence) and DeAlmeida's son, Santiago (J. D. Pardo) whose eyes first meet over a cemetery plot, become wrapped up in one another. Pardo segues into Danny Pino as Lawrence grows up to be Theron, and many other things occur and most of the loose ends are tied up properly. Not all of them.
Basinger is mostly emotionless, and gives little reason for the affair. Theron seems to be thinking about her next movie. There's good work from Jose Maria Yazpik as Carlos, friend to Basinger's lover, but he doesn't have a lot of purpose or a lot to do, either.
At the Plaza Frontenac
–Jo