Dead Reckoning

Cross to bear: Tommy Lee Jones as a Texas rancher in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Photo Dawn Jones. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

The hallmarks of a western are a rural setting, an obsession with moral codes and taciturn heroes predisposed to violence. While often accused of shoring up the jingoistic founding myths of the American frontier, this film genre has also been used to debunk those myths. From John Ford to Sam Peckinpah, the horse opera has often served as a kind of Trojan horse, smuggling in eloquent critiques of racism (The Searchers) or America’s involvement in Vietnam (The Wild Bunch) while still offering sturdy entertainment. Tommy Lee Jones’s big-screen directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, fits snugly in the Peckinpah mould: it’s elegiac, allegorically ambitious, brutal and well suited to exploring social issues particular to our globalist age.

The film is loosely based on the case of a Latino-American murdered by U.S. Marines near the Mexican border in 1997. In an unnamed West Texas town, an aging, amiably gruff rancher named Pete Perkins (Jones) hires an illegal alien, Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo), to work as a cowhand. When Estrada is mistakenly killed by a hotheaded border patrolman named Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), the murder is quickly covered up by the corrupt local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam). The killing and its immediate aftermath are depicted in a disjointed, brisk manner (Jones has cited Jean-Luc Godard as an influence). The brief disorientation of the opening minutes quickly gives way to a more linear narrative. Why Estrada was murdered remains a question for much of the film’s first half; who killed him is never in doubt, and once Perkins figures this out, the film kicks into gear.

Perkins kidnaps Norton, dragging him across the border on horseback; the old rancher also brings Estrada’s rotting corpse, thus honouring a promise he made to the Mexican that, in the event of his death, he would be buried in his hometown. The journey is both grotesque and comic, and the spectacle of seeing an American border guard being taken, forcibly, the wrong way across the Rio Grande has a piquant irony. The filmmaker’s sympathies are quite evident. Earlier in the film, Norton roughs up a group of Mexicans trying to sneak into Texas; he subsequently runs afoul of the same bunch on the other side of the border. They grudgingly spare his life, only to later give him a nasty taste of his own medicine. Throughout the journey, the patrolman is abused by Perkins and the elements alike, but it’s Estrada’s dead body that receives the worst treatment: beset by ants, the sun and his own inevitable decomposition, the late Mexican starts to look increasingly like an animatronic figure left over from Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean attraction.

No horsin' around: Perkins and patrolman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Photo Dawn Jones. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

Despite its ostensible horror, Three Burials is languid and bluntly poetic. Jones proves to be as reticent a director as he is an actor, here allowing his camera to do most of the talking. (Chris Menges, who shot The Killing Fields and The Mission, provides the gorgeous cinematography.) Jones has an obvious love of the landscape (some of the film was shot on his 100-acre ranch in San Saba, Texas), but also an eye for grim detail: one of the film’s most arresting images features a horse slipping, then tumbling, off the side of a mountain.

Penned by Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) — often dubbed Mexico’s Quentin Tarantino — the script occasionally feels slight. No matter, as Jones gets the most out of his performers, especially himself. His familiar pocked cheeks are barely concealed by a meagre white beard, but the bravado he usually brings to his characters is leavened by a more appealing uncertainty, a well-earned world-weariness. As always, Yoakam is a marvel, by turns shifty and charming. (The pleasure of his presence is doubly felt when one of his songs pops up on the soundtrack.) Some of the other characters are less nuanced; Norton’s neglected, beauty-queen wife, for example, is a one-note foil. But the shortfall is corrected with standout performances from musician Levon Helm, as a blind hermit, and the graceful Melissa Leo, as Rachel, a hardbitten waitress who has sex with the sheriff but is in love with Perkins.

Before Perkins, Norton and the late Mr. Estrada reach the end of their tortuous trip — where a plot reversal undermines Perkins’s idealized image of his late friend — there’s a single, beautiful moment that reveals the film’s true heart. Perkins, alone in a ramshackle cantina festooned with Christmas lights, makes a phone call to Rachel, asking if she’ll marry him. Despite her answer, Jones’s expression — a complicated jumble of bemusement, contentment and desperation — never changes. Perkins hangs up the phone and swaggers drunkenly through the small bar; a young girl plays piano in the background. Perkins stops, stares out at the dusky Mexican countryside that he loves. His odyssey is less about vengeance, or honouring a debt, than learning something about himself — no matter how close the sun may be to setting.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada opens Feb. 24 in Toronto and Vancouver.

Jason McBride is a Toronto-based writer and editor.

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