Friday February 10, 2006 SGN.org |
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Volume 34 Issue 06 |
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Saturday, Nov 21, 2009
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Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada |
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| Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada | ||
| Tommy Lee Jones' weird, inspired Texas border odyssey
by Derich Mantonela - A&E Writer Latin American writing often combines surreal avant-garde with dark, grotesque humor. Such is the case with Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, script by Guillermo Arriaga ("Amores Peros" and "21 Grams") and directed by Tommy Lee Jones, the legendary West Texas "cowboy intellectual" actor. Jones plays Pete, a grizzled foreman of a ranch near a small West Texas border town. He hires and befriends a Mexican drifter (the handsome, robust Julio Cedillo, playing Melquiades). The two men bond, becoming best buddies. Not exactly in the sense of Brokeback, but something close to that in spirit, if not in flesh (though we can't be entirely sure about the latter). A snarly young white-trashy Border Patrolman Mike (Barry Pepper) arrives newly on the scene, bored/antsy/pretty wife (January Jones) in tow. Among the dusty, crusty little town's featured characters are a truck-stop waitress (played by Melissa Leo) and the testy, scrawny, nasty redneck local Sheriff (Dwight Yoakam). All of whom are superb actors, expertly juicing up their roles under Jones' command. As the action later moves down across the border, several fine Mexican actors, unknown here, play small yet significant roles. But it is Jones' steely, unwavering, almost mystic performance which forms the heart and soul of this unusual film; everything is reflected and deflected via his character's opaque, driven psyche. The townspeople's quiet desperation, simmering with barely repressed crankiness and lust under the merciless Texas sun, forms a sort of preliminary tableau to the action which follows. Patrolman Pepper, roaming the barren hinterlands in search of Illegal Aliens, settles down for a quiet jerkoff to his Hustler Magazine when a bullet whizzes past his exposed rear. Struggling to pull up his pants, he wildly fires off several shots in retort, one of which kills Melquiades, tending sheep nearby, having fired his own shot at a marauding coyote. Pepper attempts to cover up his involvement in the incident (resulting in the first of Melquiades' "three burials") but is soon found out by Foreman Pete, who rushes to implement his own bizarre judgment and punishment: he kidnaps Mike, forces him to dig up Melquiades (who has been summarily interred by the Sheriff who deemed him just another Wetback) and to help him transport the body across the Rio Grande into Mexico for proper burial in Melquiades' home town. Their bizarre odyssey, through unforgiving, hazardous landscapes (well captured by cinematographer Chris Mendes) forms the second half of the film and takes on an increasingly epic, darkly demented and blackly humorous aura. A scene in which the party visits a Mexican cantina, the miniature equivalent of the town from which they commenced their journey, is eerily effective, as is their encounter with a lonely, blind, demented Gringo recluse who feeds and houses them and then begs them to be put him out of his misery. The Patrolman, bitten by a rattlesnake in his desperation to flee from the evidently insane Foreman, is forced, ironically, to seek folk-medicine help from a young Mexican woman he had earlier brutalized on the other side of the border. She saves his life while exacting her revenge. In the end, it turns out that Melquiades, whose rotting corpse is tenderly attended to throughout the whole ordeal, may or may not have been who he said he was. It's mythological/allegorical stuff of the highest potency, an inspired study of divine madness, of clashed cultures, of loyalty and love carried to extremes which transcend the mundane, elevating it from ashes to a sort of skewed glory. |
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