The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, an Arriaga script helmed by first-time director Tommy Lee Jones, again suffers from an overly-complex structure, but only for the first half. What eventually amounts to a relatively simple, sometimes disturbing genre Western about friendship, redemption and the unspoken cowboy code of honor begins life as an elaborate, labyrinthine morality tale. I'm not certain what Arriaga or Jones thought would be achieved by making the film's first half nearly impossible to follow; they suffuse the opening passages with a feeling of oppressiveness and ennui but little else. Once all the faux-artistry and tired archetyping is finished with, and the film's centerpiece journey begins in earnest, things finally start to get interesting.
Honestly, the two halves of this movie barely have any connection to one another. The film opens with two Texas hunters discovering the dead body of an illegal Mexican immigrant, Melquiades Estrada. He's been wroking in the borderlands as a cowboy alongside his only real friend, the soft-spoken Pete Perkins (Jones). Over the next 45 minutes, through scenes that don't follow any sort of logical progression, Jones depicts the circumstances surrounding Estrada's death.
We meet overzealous, generally unpleasant Border Patrol agent Mike Nelson (Barry Pepper), the man who accidentally shot Estrada, and his comely but bored wife (January Jones). Several side stories are developed and then dropped, including Pete's tense pseudo-friendship with the town's racist sheriff (Dwight Yoakum, who plays racists in just about every film in which he appears) and his awkward romance with a married waitress (Michelle Leo, who also appeared as Benicio del Toro's wife in 21 Grams).
Realizing that the so-called law enforcement types don't feel like investigating the killing of a Mexican by a white man, Pete takes it upon himself to dig up Melquiades' body and rebury the corpse in Mexico. (In a scene Jones returns to several times, Melquiades asks Pete to return his remains to the small village of Jimenez in the event of his untimely passing.) He kidnaps Pepper's Border agent to assist in the difficult journey.
Once this plot kicks into gear, Arriaga abandons the anarrative time skips and just about all the various threads he has going into the movie. Some whole plotlines are ignored and never resolved. (In one very amateurish and puzzling scene, a character essentially informs us in the audience that Yoakum's character has left the movie, never to return again. Did he have some sort of scheduling conflict?)
Fortunately, paring down the cumbersome story mechanics, focusing on the central performances and just generally trying to accomplish less philosophical heavy-lifting gives the film's second half a lyrical, moody stillness that the first half doesn't even approach. Long, nearly-wordless stretches find Norton briefly escaping Pete's clutches before being driven back to his captor out of neccessity. A sequence in which the duo stops to rest at the dilapadated shack of a crusty old blind man provides for one of the most stoic, quietly heartbreaking moments in any film last year.
Even so, I'm not sure the film ever gets around to saying exactly what's on Arriaga and Jones' mind. They kind of dance around a lot of different ideas - the collision of modernity and the Old Ways of the borderlands, the dehumanization of foreigners that allows racism to linger on stubbornly, the close fraternal bond between men that supercedes all other responsibilities and even the inherent value of keeping a promise and offering sincere atonement for ones sins.
But these are all ideas interjected into the film but never really capitalized upon, as opposed to genuine insights such as you might expect from a movie this ponderous and heavy-handed. In particular, the movie seems to offer a redemptive story for Pete but without showing us what faults he needs to redeem. Certainly, the character is rough around the edges and does some unpleasant things to his captive during the film. Also, as played by Jones, Pete grows increasingly delusional and strange as the film wears on, eventually chatting with Melquiades' dead body like Benny in Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. But, unlike Mike Nelson, he's not an ugly, calculating or dishonest man.
As long as we're discussing Jones performance, I must comment on his Spanish-language ability. Whenever he speaks Spanish, he raises his voice at the end of each word, giving him kind of a South of the Border Valley Girl inflection. "SenOR, por faVOR, ayudaME." I'd still say it's probably his best performance since The Fugitive, but that's not saying much, as he's been kind of lost in the woods recently in hideous flops like The Missing and Men in Black 2.
One could argue, perhaps, that the film offers the story of Nelson's redemption rather than Pete's, but aside from some last-minute Stockholm Syndrome, he doesn't seem to learn much compassion for others or tolerance or restraint. Attempting escape even when lost in the middle of the desert, refusing to apologize for his crimes against Melquiades until threatened at gunpoint, Nelson only gives up his disaffected cruelty and self-absorption superficially, when he needs to in order to live. Pepper's believable as a real shitheel, but he's never really called upon to show us the shitheel's softer side, so the performance becomes a bit grating and one-note.
And speaking of "grating" elements, let's talk about Marco Beltrami's awful, irritating score. Beltrami's been ruining movies left and right lately with sharp, unpleasant and intrusive scores that try to underline every single emotion expressed in the movie. His work on Red Eye feels plucked from a cheap 80's slasher film and doesn't mix at all with Wes Craven's actual movie. In his review of the upcoming Omen remake, Harry Knowles specifically points out the ineffectual obnoxiousness of another Beltrami score. This guy must be stopped!
Despite these issues with the content and the music, the film is still a fairly impressive debut for Tommy Lee Jones as a director. Chris Menges' able, unflinching cinematography captures the harshness but also the sun-soaked dreaminess of the Mexican landscape and the set design vividly contrasts the quotidian drabness of the trailer parks against the picturesque serenity of these vistas. Admirably, he's not afraid to make the movie visually ugly and doesn't shy away from potentially disturbing or violent imagery. Shots of Melquiades' body rotting in the hot sun are plentiful, and Jones has a lot of fun trying out different, visceral methods of suggesting the revolting smells following the characers around on their grotesque mission.
There's also a rather surprising undercurrent of pitch-black comedy that bobs up to the surface occasionally. Like in Peckinpah's Alfredo Garcia, the outlandish gruesomeness and bizarre desperation inherent in the drama - men literally digging up the graves of their friends and taking the bodies on one final, ghoulish "road trip" - allows for occasional moments of bleak, weary humor.
Pete makes Mike dig up Melquiades' decaying body and the corpse collapses on top of the man for a brief moment. Suddenly, a wry smile crosses Pete's face. Is it a smile of recognition, seeing someone else carry the burden of Melquiades' dreams for a moment? The fact that another man is now suffering indignities that Pete has long imagined resting on his own shoulders? Or is it just a touch of schadenfraude, a moment when Pete takes a vacation from his worries and trials to simply enjoy another man's misfortune? Either way, Jones plays the moment perfectly, and it succeeds somehow in getting a tight, almost bitter laugh.
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