Popcorn Lobotomy

Well, ladies and gents, writer, and now director, Guillermo Arriaga has hit on a formula. Take a banal plot centred around a single tragic event, present it in non-chronological order, set it against a desolate landscape, chuck in some big name actors, and add some bleak guitar over the top. Critical gold!


The Director

I enjoyed Guillermo Arriaga's first film, Amores Perros, on which he served as a writer. It had a vitality and energy that was attractive, and showed me a world that I had never seen before. It presented a series of sub-plots, all examining the reprercussions of a single tragic event (in that case a car crash).

All his subsequent films have done essentially the same thing. But he's stepped behind the camera this time, after a split from his former film-making partner Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (which I would imagine came about over a disagreement about which tragic inciting incident to include in the next film - perhaps Arriaga pitched the burning caravan that features in the Burning Plain, but Inarritu insisted it had to be mongoloid infant rape).

In The Burning Plain, he's at it again, but in this one he's added a twist. Instead of showing a series of related sub-plots that centre around a tragic event, he's had the masterstroke to make the subplots SEEM unrelated for two thirds of the film! Eventually he doles out enough information to the viewer to reveal his structure is exactly the same as his previous efforts, but for a while he lets you think that he's completely gone off the rails and presented you with two completely disconnected story threads.

This, of course, gets in the intellectuals and the critics. Oh you don't like the film? Yes, yes, yes, it's really a thinking person's film, isn't it? Oh you found it confusing? Yes, you really do need to engage your brain, I see. Challenging stuff.


The Story

Fact is, that despite the chronologically jumbled plot line, the pretty landscapes and the sombre music, the story is actually devoid of any real complexity. It consists of about 5 major plot points, mind-numbingly interspersed with long, drawn out shots of people looking sad or having unenjoyable sex in order to fill the two hour running time to qualify for serious drama.

Allow me to summarize, should you wish to save yourself a couple of hours of slow push-ins. Sylvia discovers her mother is having an affair with some Mexican dude. So naturally she sabotages the gas lines and sets fire to their caravan where they are shagging. She is mortified to learn that this frivolous and harmless prank actually leads to the caravan exploding in a ball of flames, killing both lovers. Of course, this leads her to become a slut, so she shags the son of the man her mother was shagging, gets pregnant, gives up the baby, then becomes even more slutty before wanting to see her daughter again and eventually sorta kinda start working things out with her.

At least it wasn't another car crash, but still, you can see how it might not quite justify the running time.


The Acting

Theron gets her tits out right at the start, so you know it's one of her serious films and not... well... Aeon Flux or some garbage like that.

If you like people acting depressed, you'll love this film -- and the stoic, emotionally scarred portrayals themselves are actually quite convincing.

Theron handles our hero Sylvia with impressive competence. She never cracks up in the middle of looking depressed, erroneously raises an comic eyebrow or rips a fart during a serious dramatic scene.

The young version of Sylvia - who is called Mariana at that point in order to hide the conceit that she is the younger version of Sylvia until the end -- is played well by newcomer Jennifer Lawrence. I'll put aside the fact that an American kid is called Mariana, just because Arriaga likes to have his kid's names in every film he makes. She's probably too young for me to say she's hot, so I'll say she's engaging or something like that.

Kim Basinger does another standard rendition of the dysfunctional, broken mother. She also lets us see her riding a dude from behind again, but we don't get to see her tits because the character lost them to breast cancer and I assume they couldn't afford the prosthetics.

But lets be honest here, people. You could have got wax statues to stand in for most of the cast, as the script rarely requires them to move or speak.


The Verdict

Well, I got through it, which is more than I can say for the utterly shithouse Babel. I look forward to discovering the next tragic inciting incident from Arriaga. How about a young girl gets her pet goldfish flushed down the toilet by a school bully, so she kills him with a blunt pick-axe and is emotionally scarred enough to become a slut later in life?

And, come on Arriaga, how about a joke? Just one little joke? No?

1 star, for the sluttiness.