The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Ambling onto the screen gracefully and powerfully from the literate mind of Mexican novelist and screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga, the script of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is proof that, thematically, there is nothing as timeless as the genre of the Western. Produced, directed and starring Tommy Lee Jones, this is a poignant film, probing at a variety of classic cowboy themes such as honour, friendship, machismo and dignity.
When Pete Perkins (Jones) hires the titular Mexican illegal immigrant (Julio Cedillo), to work on his ranch, the two become close friends. When Melquiades is accidentally shot and killed by Border patrolman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), and the local police choose to ignore this killing of a 'wetback', Perkins decides to take the law into his own hands, and honour the deal he made with his friend to bury him in his cross border hometown of Jimenez.
Jones has never been better, in a performance that is pregnant with frustration, isolation and borderline insanity. His haggard, beaten face and dark, lugubrious eyes have seemingly suffered in the desert for too many years and his character study is the beating heart of the film. Pepper, as the inexperienced, sexually inept patrolman, is eerily reminiscent of a young Christopher Walken, executing a performance laced with bottled aggression and emotional turmoil. In support, Melissa Leo is perfectly cast as a waitress enjoying what little she can in a place like this, while January Jones is both beautiful and restrained as the naïve, wistful wife of laconic patrolman Norton. The lesson in humanity unfolds with the same scattered chronology that Arriaga employed in his scripts for both Amores Perros and 21 grams, and helps the characters to be explored quickly and insightfully, with the actual shooting of Melquiades, from two points of view, being a particularly stark and brutal occurrence.
Like John Sayles’s Lone Star, The Three Burials treats it's Hispanic characters with equality, and Jones himself, speaking a sizeable amount of Spanish, is representative of the idea that the lands we are watching belong as much to the Mexicans as they do to the Americans that live there. The influences of past masters of both these themes, and this genre, hang wonderfully in the still air, brought to rasping life by Jones and his Oscar-winning British cinematographer Chris Menges. Ford, Huston and, most obviously, Peckinpah, once roamed these plains shooting their Westerns and exorcising their own demons, and this elegiac, plaintive contribution, while certainly a tribute of sorts, is far more than the sum of its parts. Taking it's time and allowing the audience to make up their own minds about every character, this is an off-beat, cerebral film, which never spells anything out, and is peppered with flecks of dark humour, one such moment being the appearance of Levon Helm formerly of The Band, making a symbolic, haunting cameo as a blind hermit.
The journey to bury Melquiades for the last time is as much spiritual as it is physical and far from a Peckinpah-esque spray of spectacular violence, at the conclusion you are left with a series of ideas and reflections. This is a mature, introspective film, made with passion, written with soul, acted with beauty and smouldering with a humanity that resonates with you long after you've left the cinema