Guillermo Arriaga's The Burning Plain is a slow-simmer sort of film, taking every moment of its nearly two hours to bring its story of two families connected by tragedy to a boil. But it takes just 20 seconds to expose - literally, EXPOSE - its star, Charlize Theron.
Oh, yes, the gorgeous former model is naked.
Gallery: Movie transformations
But the scene leaves you far more uneasy than aroused. As mysterious loner Sylvia, Theron cuts a harsh, flawed figure in the cold, bluish light of morning. "Get out," she snaps to a man sleeping in her bed.
And she doesn't bother saying goodbye when he leaves.
"When I read the script I thought it was a great opening to the character," Theron says of her stark introduction, which might have caused any other actress to lobby for a rewrite. "You start asking questions immediately as soon as you see it. 'Who is this woman? Who would be that cold to the man that she wakes up with?'"
Playing unlikable characters is nothing new to Theron, who won an Oscar in 2004 for her physically and emotionally unflattering turn as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster.
The role of Sylvia gave Theron a chance to star in the directorial debut of Arriaga, who is best known as the screenwriter for the acclaimed indies Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Interwoven story lines and an aura of mystery around characters and their hidden emotional baggage, Arriaga's stock in trade, ran through those films, as they do in The Burning Plain.
The movie cuts between the story of Sylvia and that of two families living in a small town near the border of New Mexico and Mexico. Another plotline involves a plane crash that leaves a little girl facing the possibility of losing her only caregiver, her father.
"Guillermo really writes how we think," Theron says. Publicly, Sylvia is a graceful, whip-smart restaurateur, but privately she is drowning in a sea of self-destruction. "How can she run a restaurant and behave how she is?" Theron asks. "She just had a terrible accident happen in her life, and it really sort of marked her. I like that not everything is answered. ...You want to live in a society that is dealt with and done with, and that's not life. Life is not done with and dealt with."
Theron is often as terse as her character when talking about her life and her work, which lately has included producing a slate of movies and even television pilots under the banner of her production company Denver and Delilah Films (named for her two dogs).
The South Africa native softens a bit when asked about her Africa Outreach Project, which began as an HIV-Aids education project in her homeland and has since broadened to include computer training and infrastructure projects, which she sees as a natural extension of HIV prevention. "I'm very passionate about it," she says, ticking off a list of the organisation's accomplishments, including planning soccer fields for children in conjunction with the World Cup's arrival in the nation next year.
So what's next for Theron the actress? Are there dream roles? No, she answers flatly. Roles couldn't matter less.
"For me, it's about the story," she says. "I think it always has to go back to stories. As an actor, you're just a canvas to tell it." There is no recipe for choosing a role, she explains. "If something stays with me, or it's a world that I'm interested in, or people I'm interested in... when those things feel right, you just have to believe and jump off the cliff."
Where lives collide in tales of tragedy
No matter how bad your life is, be thankful you're not a character in a Guillermo Arriaga screenplay, which is like a house of mirrors where life is contorted into outsize tragedies, each casting its own wailing reflection until everyone is dizzy with anguish.
Now the Mexican screenwriter (Babel, Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) has written and directed The Burning Plain, with Charlize Theron as Sylvia, a seriously depressed woman who has never recovered from the tragic consequences of an adolescent decision.
The movie toggles between Sylvia's blue, despondent Oregon and the dusty, rusty border of Mexico and New Mexico, where an American family and a Mexican family spar over an extra-marital affair. Gina (Kim Basinger) and Nick (Joaquim de Almeida) are middle-aged parents and madly in love. Their families respond to this news with varying degrees of hostility, but it is Gina's oldest daughter, Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence), who has the strongest, most cataclysmic reaction. How and why Sylvia fits into this story is the crux of this plaintive, strangely unfeeling film, which motors along on somber fumes but nevertheless showcases three generations of actresses in peak form.
Basinger, Theron and Lawrence each have remarkable scenes that play like knockout readings for an audition rather than organic parts of a larger story. Lawrence has the toughest role and does her best to justify an outrageous reaction to her mother's affair. Theron, a powerhouse in Monster and North Country, successfully internalises some choppy character history. And Basinger has never been lovelier or more heartbreaking as a housewife lured away from patching her children's clothes toward a man who mends her heart.
In the end, though, their characters are in a Guillermo Arriaga movie. You have the warning they never got.
