Review: The Three Burials of Melquides Estrada

Tommy Lee Jones on Westerns:

“The idea of making Westerns means nothing to me. The idea of working at home and dealing with the history and the present time of where I live and where I’m from is the only thing I’m interested in.”

Tommy Lee Jones on the desert:

“It makes people who they are. You have to tell your right name.”

I had high expectations for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.  The film was the result of the combined talents of  actor/director Tommy Lee Jones, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores perros, 21 Grams), and two-time Academy Award-winning cinematographer Chris Menges. The film had done well at last year’s Cannes festival, with Jones’ performance and Arriaga’s screenplay winning awards. So I was expecting good things. I was not disappointed.

The film’s title makes plain the dramatic arc of the movies three-act plot: following his death, the body of a man named Melquidas Estrada receives, under various circumstances, three different burials.

Melquidas Estrada (Julio Cedillo) is a Mexican vaquero hired and befriended by ranch foreman Pete Perkins (Jones) after immigrating illegally. Estrada is accidentally shot and killed by newly-assigned border patrolman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), who then—rather than report the incident as an accidental shooting—hastily buries Estrada’s body in a shallow grave. The grave is soon discovered and the body exhumed, only to be hastily reburied by the local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam) in hopes of avoiding any trouble with Perkins.

When Perkins finally finds out what happened, he abducts Norton at gunpoint and forces him to dig up Estrada’s body. The two men then embark on a journey to Estrada’s remote Mexican village (we learn via flashback that Perkins promised Estrada that if Estrada died in the U.S., Perkins would take him “back home”).    

Like Arriaga’s previous screenplays, the film’s first two acts are presented achronologically, shifting to a more conventional chronological narrative for the journey of the final act. Brutal, darkly melancholic, and macabrely funny, Three Burials is immediately reminiscent of Arriaga’s 21 Grams and Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, though ultimately it’s more nuanced  than either.

The movie was shot in Queretaro, Mexico, Big Bend National Park, Odessa, Van Horn, and Shafter, Texas, and on Jones’ own West Texas ranch. Jones and Menges handling of the landscapes is particularly impressive, capturing its grandness and sweep and somehow matching it to the grandeur of Jones’ face, and to that of human character in general.