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The Burning Plain: three women, looking for a way out
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The stars of The Burning Plain should win some sort of award for making suffering compelling, and I mean that as a compliment. It can’t be easy to cheer up a storyline set in motion by a flaming trailer and a crashed plane, especially when your writer is Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, 21 Grams), your timeline is scrambled, and the opening image (said trailer burning in a wheat field) is so striking it threatens to make everything that follows almost inconsequential. 
Which isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with Arriaga’s script: there’s not, or very little anyway. He makes his directorial debut here, and it’s a promising one, especially given the flow of the piece and the performances he’s gotten from his cast: Kim Basinger as a straying mother, Jennifer Lawrence as her suspicious daughter, and Charlize Theron as a restaurant owner who eschews her sort-of boyfriend (John Corbett) for promiscuous sex. Brett Cullen plays Basinger’s husband, Joaquim de Almeida her lover, and J.D. Pardo his son, and while the actors are good they’re mostly peripheral, characters for these women to pull close and push away.
What’s notable about The Burning Plain is not the convoluted structure but the moments Arriaga chooses, as well as deceptively simple dialogue that often hits just the right notes. Theron plays Sylvia, a Portland restaurant owner already tensely self-destructing when a stranger follows her home and tells her that she has a daughter. Meanwhile, Mariana (Lawrence) gets tired of feeding her siblings dinner and listening to her mother Gina's timid excuses (“I loved my mother,” she tells Pardo, “but I didn’t like her”). Gina (Basinger), a cancer survivor, tries to end the affair she’s been having at a secluded trailer, and, in Mexico, young Maria (Tessa Ia) watches her father’s plane crash and waits by his hospital bed.
Ultimately – and, in the second half, a bit too predictably – this is a story of hope. It doesn’t always work as such. The characters are appealing and sympathetic almost despite themselves, yet the film is stronger when it’s observing them rather than sorting things out. Arriaga gives tremendous weight to images and elements, and there’s a spooky scene in which Lawrence calmly holds a flame against her arm. This is The Burning Plain at its most effective – when pain is palpable but no one says anything about it.
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