The script for the Burning Plain was written and directed by the same
guy who wrote 21 Grams, Babel, Amores Perros, and The Three Burials of
Melquiades Estrada.
If you are familiar with those films, you probably already know
whether you want to see this one. People love his work or hate it. His
scripts are meticulously crafted in the same manner as Atom Egoyan's,
with several stories spinning off from a central tragic event, all of
which eventually come back to form a single narrative. Unlike
chronological narratives, which create dramatic tension and audience
involvement from events per se, Arriaga's scripts involve the viewer
in the relationship between events. He may reveal the film's central
event right at the beginning of the film, or he may place it somewhere
in the middle, but the event itself is never the reason why we want to
watch. That is the structure used by Arriaga (and Egoyan) to force us
to concentrate on the characters' motivations, and their relationship
to one another, rather than on the things that happen to them.
After watching one of his best films, you'll be amazed to find out that
less than nothing happened, and yet you never lost interest. By "less than
nothing," I am referring to his reversal of the usual screenwriting
process, in which mundane action builds up to a point where something
significant happens, at which point the film either ends or shifts our
interest from "What will happen?" to "How will people be affected?" In
Arriaga's scripts, the significant thing happens, then builds down to
humdrum action, and we are interested in how the characters could have
gotten to that climactic point in the first place. Only later, after some
of the secrets have been revealed, do we get an interest in how the event
may have affected them after it occurred. That is Arriaga's skill, and he
is brilliant at it.
In this case, the central incident is an explosion in the desert. Two
lovers cheat on their respective spouses in an old trailer which seems to
be marooned in the middle of nowhere. A gas leak causes the trailer to
explode, killing the lovers instantly, their bodies fused together. Four
stories spin off from this event. One story line pictures the lives of the
lovers before the event. Another relates a romance which later develops
between the daughter of the cheating wife and the son of the cheating
husband. A third, at first seemingly unrelated, is about an unhappy woman
who uses casual sex as a form of self-punishment. The final story, which
also seems irrelevant when it begins, is about a Mexican-American daughter
and her beloved dad, who is a crop-dusting pilot. Although character
development is the film's raison d'etre, there is an element of mystery
which involves us. How do these characters fit together? Are all the
events taking place at the same time? Do these stories involve different
characters, or the same characters at different ages? What do those two
ostensibly unrelated plot threads have to do with the explosion? Was the
death of the lovers an accident? All of these questions are answered
slowly and adroitly.
I mentioned at the outset that people either love Arriaga's films or
hate them. I have mixed feelings about his work. While his exposition is
brilliant, his weltanschauung is far too bleak to present anything
resembling real life in multiple dimensions. His characters are wounded,
bitter, and self-loathing caricatures. Their lives are filled with
abandonment, murder, infidelity, and despair. These are the kind of people
who think Leonard Cohen writes great drinking songs. In fact, the
terminally melancholy Cohen would probably find these characters too
depressing. I love some of Arriaga's scripts, dislike others. That hinges
on whether he can control his excesses: pretension, artiness, and
melodrama. He did so here. I think this is his subtlest work. Shockingly
enough, he even passes up on a chance to kill off a major character and
... wait for it ... he actually has some Americans who are not racists!
Who could have dreamed? OK, maybe there aren't any scenes that could be
scored with the Turtles' "Happy Together" instead of a Gregorian funeral
dirge, but you have to understand how hard it is for him to make this kind
of progress. Those in the fine arts tend to think that the greater the
despair, the greater the art, and they distribute awards and praise
accordingly. They are more likely to give Oscars to a lame holocaust movie
than a brilliant comedy. Given the positive reinforcement from peers, some
authors get addicted to writing about despair, and that addiction clouds
everything in their lives, just as if it were heroin. And it's just as
hard to kick.
Arriaga is in a very early stage of his 12 steps to get that monkey off
his back. But at least he's making progress.
