The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

A stiff shows up with gruesome repetition in the new Tommy Lee Jones movie, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," and some will be surprised to learn that it isn't Jones' former college roommate, Al Gore, in spite of how swell he would have been for the part.

Instead, the dead man is Melquiades Estrada (Julia Cesar Cedillo), an illegal Mexican immigrant who is mysteriously shot and killed while working as a cowboy tending to sheep in Texas. Who did him in? Initially, that's the question around which you believe the film will build, with Jones, in his fine directorial debut, weaving through time to piece together the mystery.

But as written by Guillermo Arriago, screenwriter for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's terrific "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," the movie quickly dispenses with its mystery and exposes the murderer. Since the film's success doesn't hinge on the revelation, it doesn't harm the movie.

What "Burials" has on its mind is something deeper, a character study that recalls the richness of Sam Peckinpah and John Ford--and even a flash of Quentin Tarantino in its bold use of title cards--with Jones creating exactly the sort of movie you'd expect. Like the actor, "Burials" is unpretentious, interesting, laid back, slightly askew. You expect an erotic undercurrent and a violent edge to run through it, and you get it.

The film stars Jones as Pete Perkins, Estrada's employer and friend, who is determined to find out who murdered him, why they murdered him, and make them pay for murdering him.

Dwight Yoakum is the local sheriff who has his own reasons not to get involved, and so he doesn't. Barry Pepper is Mike Norton, the squirrelly border patrol officer who has passionless sex with his wife, Lou Ann (January Jones), while she watches comparatively more interesting soap operas. Once, they were the most popular kids in their high school, with the hope of promising futures pinned on them because of their good looks. But now, they live near poverty in a trailer along the Mexican border, and in spite of their youth, they seem every bit as dried up as the terrain surrounding them.

Looking for new adventures, Lou Ann finds her way to the local coffee shop, where she meets the waitress Rachel (Melissa Leo, marvelous), who loves her husband, Bob, but not enough to be faithful to him--she's sleeping with Pete and the sheriff. In the relationship that builds between the two women, we learn about Estrada, who was trying to earn money to bring his family across the border, while Pete is busy kidnapping one of the other characters in a plot twist that consumes the rest of the movie.

"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" has no trouble living up to its title--it does indeed bury Estrada three times, and each time with increasing difficulty. By the end of the movie, his corpse has been exhumed twice, ripped apart by coyotes, baked to a crisp in the Texas heat, and then carried to Mexico via horseback for the proper burial Estrada once said in passing to Pete that he wanted.

Only in one scene does Pete appear to truly see Estrada for what he has become; it devastates him. Otherwise, in the blindness and madness that can accompany loss and grief, he's just doing what anyone would do when a great friend passes. Pete is carrying out Estrada's wishes, seeing them through, regardless of who he might inconvenience along the way. There's beauty in that, and it colors the movie.

Grade: B+