EDGE San Francisco

Lives twist, veer, and finally intersect in writer/director Guillermo Arriaga’s film The Burning Plain.

The film is a little confusing at first, as it jumps between three different story lines. In one, taking place in Portland, Oregon, a disaffected young woman, Sylvia (Charlize Theron) beds men, then dumps them before they can get too close; this leads her into awkward situations where jealous lovers like John (John Corbett) confront her even as she slips into the expensive car of a new playmate. Meantime, a long-faced, dark-eyed man named Carlos (José María Yazpik) seems to be stalking her.

The second plot thread takes place in Mexico, and concerns a crop duster named Santiago (Danny Pino) and his daughter, Maria (Tessa Ia). When Santiago’s plane crashes, he sends his daughter off to her mother while he recovers, but this is an uncertain proposition, since Maria’s mother abandoned the family just after her birth.

The third story the film follows unfolds in New Mexico, and concerns a middle-aged wife and mother named Gina (Kim Basinger) whose affair with a married man called Nick (Joaquim de Almeida) has tragic consequences when the trailer that serves as the isolated site of their assignations explodes into a fireball in the midst of their lovemaking. As one of Nick’s sons explains it, the blaze melted their flesh into one charred lump; the toasted lovers had to be sliced apart before they could be buried by their shocked, outraged families.

It’s at Nick’s burial that the shock and the outrage spill over, improbably, into love: while Gina’s husband Robert (Brett Culland) tears into Nick’s families, one of the dead man’s sons (J.D. Pardo) falls for Robert’s daughter (Jennifer Lawrence), a watchful young woman whose take-charge attitude is countered by a tendency to inflict scars on herself. Both are indications of an iron will; but the tragedy, and the questions it raises for the teenaged children, creates a situation in which vulnerabilities surface and youthful tenderness thrives in spite of the volatile emotions of the surviving adults.

In other words, "The Burning Plain" is a little bit of Romeo and Juliet spun out into a cotton-candy fantasia, though with a complicated narrative structure that seems meant to prevent the story from seeming too obvious. Arriaga has his reasons for this: he needs to pique our curiosity in order to get the space he needs to explore the multiplying complexities of actions and their consequences.

Arriaga constructs his stories with careful attention; he has to, since the film starts out by jumping around so much, and then proceeds, slowly, to drawn all of its elements together so that the pieces eventually form a coherent story. But it seems like a lot of work to go to, on his part and ours, for what we end up with.

That’s not to say that Arriaga doesn’t have some good ideas, or that the cast don’t scare up a few powerful moments. Gina’s reasons for her affair with Nick are deeper-seated than mere marital boredom; Nick, meantime, lights up in her presence, which in itself tells us enough about his own home life that we don’t really need more of an explanation as to his motives (as it turns out, we don’t get any: just a passing comment that Nick and his wife got along "so-so.")

The compelling parts of the story are buried in soap bubbles, though: hospital scenes that play like something from daytime television, hilariously tone-deaf bits of dialogue, and a wildly out of place mean-girl moment for Gina’s daughter all sabotage the willing suspension of disbelief that all storytelling relies upon. Arriaga makes up for it a little with a last-minute meditation on the crucial moments of decision in the lives of all of his characters, twists of fate and choice that lead to a final chance at redemption; but where the film is pretty, it lacks punch, and where it hits home, it’s not pretty.