“If I die over here, carry me back to my family and bury me in my hometown. I don’t want to be buried on this side among all the billboards.”
Inspired by the real-life killing of a teenager by U.S. Marines along the Mexican border in 1997 and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Tommy Lee Jones’ flashback-heavy neo-Western could pass as the work of a veteran filmmaker. But prior to The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which many consider his debut proper, he’d only helmed a solitary (though oddly star-studded) made-for-television film called The Good Old Boys. It had been clear for some time that Jones was a consummate actor, with his crackling voice, sympathetic eyes, and facial wrinkles that betray hard-earned wisdom. But somehow it took him until he was nearing sexagenarian status to figure out that he had the dexterity to not only direct a film, but to direct a film in which he himself is the star. Measured and assured, Three Burials gently presents us with the gradually widening scope of its horrors and absurdities, simultaneously conveying general truths while portraying a very specific story tied to a particular place and time.
Although many have compared Jones’ debut to the work of Sam Peckinpah because of its gruff, laconic protagonist and its flavorful sense of place, Jones’ portrayal of violence is entirely different from the work of his forebear. Where Peckinpah giddily staged violent set pieces that reveled in the bloodletting, Three Burials contains only one scene of brutal violence and it is decidedly unglamorous. There is no poetry to be found in the death of Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo). Shown multiple times from various perspectives throughout the course of the film, we gradually come to understand his death as a cruel cosmic joke, a sick mistake that compounds on itself until Pete Perkins (Jones) is toting his friend’s decomposing corpse back to Mexico on horseback with his murderer in tow.
On the fateful day, Melquiades diligently fends off a coyote that is bothering his flock of goats by firing a few rifle rounds at it. Rookie border patrol agent Mike Norton (Barry Pepper)—quite literally caught with his pants down as he mindlessly peruses a well-thumbed issue of Hustler—mistakes Melquiades’ defensive tactics as an attack and returns fire, killing Melquiades with a shot to the belly. Upon realizing his error, he buries Melquiades for the first time and does not report the incident. When his body is discovered and reburied in a local cemetery, Pete uncovers evidence of foul play, but he cannot get any action out of Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam).
Flashbacks contextualize the relationship between Pete and Melquiades, making sense of Pete’s present determination to see his friend’s killer brought to justice even if it means he must enact that justice with his own hands. Those flashbacks also lend drama to the narrative as it takes us quite some time to realize that the film’s chronology is not straightforward. Several tangential characters serve to flesh out the sordid state of the rundown town in which the crime took place, including the wife of the patrolman (January Jones) and a loose waitress (Melissa Leo) who spends her free time with both Pete and Sheriff Belmont, neither of whom are her husband. None of these side stories really add much to the story, but they describe the milieu in which such a crime could be so easily ignored. In such a small, dead-end community, peculiar personal connections dictate how information is circulated and it is through these back channels that Pete sniffs out the man with blood on his hands, barges into his mobile home in the dead of night and kidnaps him.
After breaking out of the wretched town, the film transitions into a surreal journey into the Mexican unknown, in some respects a spiritual pilgrimage as Pete carries his late friend’s remains like a religious relic. Forcing Mike to dig up Melquiades’ body and fasten it to the spare horse, Pete, Mike and the body of Melquiades begin a trek toward the dead man’s hometown to bury him in the land of his wife and children. The process of transferring the corpse gets bizarre in its practicality at certain points; humorous even. One night, Pete briefly sets his departed friend on fire to ward off an army of ants. The next day, he pumps antifreeze down his throat to help preserve the body. In this aspect it clearly echoes Peckinpah’s audaciously titled Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
Their journey brings them into contact with an old blind man (Levon Helm) who has a strange request for Pete, an herbal healer (Vanessa Bauche) who Mike had recently assaulted during an arrest along the border, and a group of cowboys who watch a soap opera on a small television wired to their truck battery. A warped, fragile moment occurs with the cowboys during which Mike breaks down when he realizes the soap is the same show his wife watched to distract herself the last time they lovelessly made love. These obscure characters and our protagonist’s encounters with them unfold with a sense of doomed fate found in the novels of Cormac McCarthy, where death and decay loom around each fold of the landscape. That the destruction of the simpler way of life resulted from the pervasion of technology and coincided with terrible moral rot is a notion that’s hard to miss, and suggests a further debt to Faulkner.
There’s a tenderness to Three Burials that mostly hides beneath the bleak surface. Though incapable of truly bonding in the wake of Melquiades’ death, Pete and Mike eventually come to terms and part ways with some modicum of respect for one another. Jones’ gravely demeanor and Spanish fluency are used to great effect and Pepper’s portrayal of remorse is startlingly compelling. I’m undecided on the fractured narrative but I understand that’s screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga’s style (he wrote Iñárritu’s Death Trilogy—Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, none of which are straightforward). Both Arriaga and Jones (for his acting) won awards at Cannes.
Accomplished and mature for a feature debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a raw but patient exploration of eternal themes intertwined with the encroachment of industry and the onset of technological malaise. Though perhaps placing too much of the burden on his own shoulders as an actor, Jones proves that he is more than capable as a director.