Susan Granger’s review: “Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (Sony Pictures Classics)
Tommy Lee Jones makes an auspicious big-screen directing debut with this contemporary Western that emerged a 2005 Cannes Film Festival winner for Best Actor and Best Screenplay.
When rancher Pete Perkins (Jones) discovers that his close friend, Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo), an illegal Mexican immigrant, has been brutally murdered and unceremoniously dumped into a shallow grave in the town cemetery, he vows to track down the killer and exact revenge. An accommodating diner waitress (Melissa Leo) passes along evidence that points to a particularly brutal Border Patrol agent, Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), newly arrived in Texas with his bored wife (January Jones). Since Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam) shows little interest in pursuing the “wetback” case, Pete kidnaps Mike, forces him to disinter Mel’s corpse and sets off with him on horseback across the punishing heat of desert to return Mel’s rapidly decaying body for a proper burial in his tiny, obscure hometown of Jimenez, located somewhere across the border. While evading the authorities, they have several encounters but none is more poignant than the moments spent with an old blind man (Levon Helm) subsisting in squalid isolation.
Working from a poetic, well-structured screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga, Jones assembles an excellent cast and takes a subtle, laconic approach to their journey, utilizing flashbacks to show the bond of trust that existed between Pete and Mel as they casually conversed in Spanish. Credit photographer Chris Menges and editor Roberto Silvi for comparisons with John Sayles’ “Lone Star.” On the Granger Movie Gauge, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” is a simple, stoic 7, bringing a humanist point of view to bigger issues of the human heart and mind.
