The Burning Plain (2009)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Good start, but then it gets ruined

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Blistering performances.

In the aftermath of "The Hours" (2002), how women experience time, "The Burning Plain" (2008) directed by original writer and first-time director Guillermo Arriaga breaks under the weight of a director's responsibility. Giving the full independent package of a 20 Million U.S. Dollar production budget by producers Laurie MacDonald and Walter F. Parkes and professional cast going out from Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger over Joaquim de Almeida to an early motion picture participation of Jennifer Lawrence to create a story of a struggling woman's life through the ages from 18 to 50 years.Director Guillermo Arriaga, unable to create any suspense in any given scene of full frontal character conflicts; Actress Charlize Theron strives through the scenes uninspired to sedated, just dwelling from early hard knock life experiences, at no moment challenged by the director to break through with her character of Sylvia to step on uncharted territory of psychological terror after a girl's life changing mother-murdering incident.The well-written screen-story gets hardly translated to screen, lingering in too slow, if not to say insufficient shot pacing, wasting Robert Elswit's talents as Cinematographer. Director Guillermo Arriaga, seemingly uncomfortable in the director's chair, focuses on scenes on female self-mutilation and further draining from his characters' obsessions and sex addictions. The visuals, embedded in an U.S. Mexican Border Town and cold steel urban area cliché, misses surprises to release the spectator's running low interest in the female fates.Positively to mention is the on-screen chemistry of Kim Basinger & Joaquim de Almeida, who left on their own to create a heart-breaking, doomed to fail love story. Actress Jennifer Lawrence, in her Pre- "Winter Bone" (2010) days, seems to be overwhelmed, undirected by Guillermo Arriaga and close to lost by her on-screen actions in the character of Mariana of murdering mother and her lover in a trailer gas explosion.When the incident scene happens at running time marker 01h21mins00sec (PAL version), Director Guillerma Arriaga missed out to build an accelerating sequence with Editor Craig Wood to make an emotional impact for an arresting conclusion of woman's life wasted. Probably solution might have been to rearrange the editorial's structure entirely with taking the incident into the film's opening, which would have brought Jennifer Lawrence arguably a breakthrough performance under improved directions to carry an entire picture of her shoulders at an minor age; A fact that needed to mature another two years until her breakthrough at Sundance Film Festival 2010 with her leading role in "Winter's Bone".In conclusion, "The Burning Plain" had the ingredients to be a solid psychological drama. But through lack of thriller elements, with a cast put into breathtaking tension mode and accelerated action beats, lets the film vanish into mediocrity.

"The Burning Plain" is an excellent film from 2008. It is currently available on NetFlix Instant Download Streaming. The director is Guillermo Arriaga, and the screenwriter is him as well. It is a complex film that reaches back in time with several stories simultaneously. Cause harm repeatedly to most parts of the body and they eventually grow desensitized, calloused and indifferent to the pain over time. This dispassionate, earthy and very dry aesthetic that film-maker Guillermo Arriaga applies to the world of his first major directorial outing is king; between the barren desert landscapes that permeate within the backdrops of his strangely distant and out-of-sync characters and the sparse narrative that intertwines it all together, The Burning Plain views life as a series of scars—cold and unrepresentative of the pain that brought them to the surface, but a firm reminder as such that nothing ever quite goes away, no matter how far you run. For the characters of Arriaga's story, a central catastrophe of sorts serves as the unfortunate catalyst that will bring them all together whether they like it or not. A burning trailer, housing two lovers sharing a passionate affair behind their families back, exploding in a rage of flames seemingly caused by accident. For them, the movie opens with their death thus absolving them from living with their irrevocable actions, but for those they leave behind the past stays as a constant and dictates largely how each of their futures will develop. I gave this movie 0 stars. Dale Haufrect

"The Burning Plain", directed and written by Guillermo Arriaga, follows the template of Arriaga's earlier screenplays ("21 Grams", "Babel"). Here we're treated to a non-linear, multi-strand narrative in which events unfold out of sequence. Unlike the films of Atom Egoyan, which analytically do the same thing, Arriaga's tone is melodramatic, sentimental, and overly impressed with its familiar soap opera elements.The film contains a number of big-name actresses (Kim Basinger, Jennifer Lawrence, Charlize Theron), all of whom are stuck in a plot comprised of much adultery, affairs and secret rendezvous. Families are torn apart and new relationships come together, before the film ends on a note of tragedy. The film contains some excellent aerial footage, Arriaga's camera following New Mexican crop dusters.6/10 – Worth one viewing.

Great cast! Everyone gives a zillion percent and there is some exceptional choice casting too, though the actors weren't used to their potential and their roles even came across as superfluous; but okay, I was just happy to see those specific actors.Some of the characters are too much a caricature, especially the character played by Charlize Theron. She's such a cliché, I'm afraid to say. There's something 'prodigal' about Sylvia/Mariana, both as an adult and as a teenage girl.The story builds nicely though slow; sometimes it's too slow and drags for no apparent reason. The problem is that there are bits and pieces of the storyline that are also left dangling. They tie up nicely on the one hand but then, you are left feeling that they will continue to be tools for the future insight of the characters but then they're not. So those arcs were like dangling participles in the narrative, as far as I was concerned.This film though, as I mention in my tag line is a perfect example of how flashbacks (and dream sequences) are often a VERY tricky business in a film and if they're not properly shuffled into the sequences, it can make the film disjointed and cluttered. This film has those moments but because of all the rest of the things it has going for it (landscape, good actors and a partly interesting premise) it makes you want to give it a chance and wait out the fog to get to the cliffhanger.