The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (20 May 2005)
directed by Tommy Lee Jones
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam, January Jones, Melissa Leo, Levon Helm, Mel Rodriguez
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MPAA rating: Studio: Europa Corp., Javelina Film Company Script: Guillermo Arriaga Music: Marco Beltrami Running time: 121 minutes Tags: cowboys; dead bodies; desert; Drama; immigrants; Mexico; race relations; rifles; snakes; Texas; Western Tactical strength: [4/10]
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for language, violence and sexuality
I don't mind slow and ponderous movies if the action leads somewhere or at the end you can see that the characters have made significant changes. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada moves at a glacial pace and barely develops its characters beyond a basic sketch. Tommy Lee Jones stars in and directs this film, which you probably could have guessed from the numerous head shots of Jones. Clearly, we should read great meaning into his aging features as he stares at us from the screen, but I could only read tired determination from these frequent glares.
Jones plays Pete Perkins, a lead ranch hand in charge of managing a herd of cattle in southern Texas. Pete hires illegal immigrant Melquiades (Julio Cedillo) for his team of cowboys, and the two become friends. Melquiades makes Pete promise that if Melquiades dies in Texas that Pete will take his body back to Jimenez, Mexico, for burial. The opening scenes also follow newcomer Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), a border patrol agent recently assigned to the Texas-Mexico border. The script paints Mike as a brutal agent who beats women and a demanding husband who wants nothing from his wife (January Jones) except dinner and sex. While on patrol, Mike hears gunfire that appears directed at him. In an alternate version of this scene shown later in the opening act, we learn that Melquiades sees coyotes around his goat herd and has fired rounds at the coyote. Upon hearing the gunfire, Mike retrieves his rifle and shoots his "assailant." Instead of reporting the incident to his superiors, Mike halfheartedly buries Melquiades's body. When some coyote hunters find Melquiades's body, the sheriff (Dwight Yoakam) has Melquiades -- just a wetback in the sheriff's eyes -- quickly buried after the briefest examination by the medical examiner.
In relating the opening act, I have presented the events in a roughly chronological order. The film presents these events in a non-chronological collage of scenes, and it took me a few minutes to realize that the viewpoint jumped around in time. Although I think confusing the timeline can create useful film effects, I don't see any real purpose to confuse the timeline in this opening act, and Burials proceeds in strict chronological order through the remaining acts. I think this presents another case of believing that confusion implies complexity.
Pete learns that Mike killed Melquiades and kidnaps Mike at gunpoint. After forcing Mike to exhume Melquiades's body, Pete loads everyone on a horse and makes his way into Mexico to bury Melquiades. Pete loses a horse to a fall off a cliff, must evade the rampaging border patrol, and deals Mike's attempts at escape and subsequent rattlesnake bite to his foot, but none of these events change Pete's determination to fulfill Melquiades's burial request. In a twist of cosmic irony, it appears that Melquiades made up his story about his home town, but Pete continues to search for the location Melquiades described.
Other than displaying western values of loyalty and fidelity, I don't see much purpose in Three Burials. I kept wanting to find more depth in this film. The numerous scenes of Pete with the rapidly decaying body display such tenderness and caring that I kept expecting a flashback moment to some event that tied these characters together more than just trail hands in the same group. The deepest connection shows Melquiades giving Pete a horse. We don't have any more information to make this gift anything more than gratitude for an opportunity at a job in the United States. At the end, Pete and Mike have nothing. Pete cannot return to Texas, and Mike's wife leaves him in absentia. At one point on their journey, Pete and Mike meet an ancient blind man (Levon Helm) who generously feeds the men and then begs them to shoot him. This old man symbolizes where both Pete and Mike end up. They have no family and no future, and someone might as well shoot them as not.
Three Burials also tries to make a political statement about immigrants. Most of the scenes with both Mexicans and Americans together show the Americans in a negative light. The only character in the movie given any power at all lives in Mexico. When Mike gets bitten by a rattlesnake, a Mexican woman (Vanessa Bauche) uses her knowledge of herbal medicine to save first Mike's life and then his foot from gangrene. The film also uses color in a similar fashion. Almost all the Americans dress in drab colors while the Mexicans dress in deep and often vibrant colors. The room in which the woman heals Mike has an eerie reddish glow.
In all, Three Burials tries to make big symbolic and political statements but just fails to have the power to follow through with these intentions. I had hoped that perhaps the DVD commentary might add some insight about the construction of the film. The commentary does provide some trivia about casting and shot construction, but didn't provide any deeper understanding about the bigger purposes of the film.
