The Burning Plain – written and directed by Guillermo Arriaga. Drama. 107 minutes Color 2008.
★★
The Story: A young woman sets fire to the trailer her mother and her boyfriend are making love in and burns them to death.
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It’s a failure on the grounds that the screenwriter who, usually works in a dovetailing mode, takes on a story which needs a classic three act construction. It is also a story whose contents he does not understand. The story he thinks he has written overlooks the story in front of his nose. Again a writer directs: again an error.
The real story is of a girl who deliberately murders her mother. In the movie this is denied by the girl, but since she is played by Jennifer Lawrence, an actress devoid of innocence, who is to believe her? No, no, instead it is an Electra story. What we need to see is her direct intention to murder her mother and her life’s response to that deed. And Jennifer Lawrence is the ideal Electra.
What obscures the mistake, but does not eliminate it, is the presence in it of two film stars, Kim Basinger and Charlize Theron. For when such women present themselves before us, we are faced with an enormous displacement of truth. For such ladies occupy a vast amount of film room. Castles topple around them. Redwoods bow down. Their mere arrival does this. This is always the case with certain film stars. With the greater truth of their very selves, they kidnap us, steal our fascination, credulity, shyness, and reason They are whales in teacups. They can’t help it. We want something good to happen to Theron. It is our nature to. And it is her nature that we should. We feel for Kim Basinger. It is our nature to. It is her nature that we should. The distraction is nobody’s fault. But their presence alone is enough to disguise that they are both performing in the wrong tale.
Basinger certainly is touching as the housewife/mother of four children, stuck nowhere, and losing her looks, maybe (which she has not) and losing her appeal, maybe (which she has not), and taking a rash bite of the apple before all apples are taken away. Her vulnerability steals our hearts.
Theron rides high as the grown-up version of Lawrence. We admire Theron’s mastery as a restaurateur. We go along with her flutters and affairs and how astonishing she looks in clothes. We wish the script afforded her an opportunity to meet the story head-on, but the real story is not there for her engagement with it.
Interesting to see Lawrence as a teenager playing one. Soon she too will grow large on the silver screen. She almost does it here. Won’t be all her doing either, but also ours.
Anyhow, it’s good for us to see how big big stars are, the space they displace, and that we just naturally accord to them. It’s just what they do. It’s just what we do.