Cannes turns spotlight on Jones as a director
CANNES, France -- Could Tommy Lee Jones, a man perhaps best known for his grinning, good-ol'-boy characters, be the triumphant fat lady at this year's Cannes Film Festival?
That's the talk surrounding his directorial feature debut, ''The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," one of the last films before the festival jury.
With a powerful performance by Jones, an ending that's coherent and satisfying in a competition full of ambiguous conclusions, and a fourth-quarter showing that will ring vividly in jurors' minds, the contemporary western seems a lock for some kind of award.
Jones plays a rancher who travels to Mexico with his friend's body to honor his wish to be buried in his hometown. ''Three Burials" features a screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga (who also wrote the well-received 2000 ''Amores Perros" and 2003's ''21 Grams") and a cast that includes Dwight Yoakam as a sheriff.
Jones has been in the director's chair once before, helming the 1995 cable TV movie, ''The Good Old Boys."
There's even talk ''Three Burials" may take the big prize here, the Golden Palm. Tommy Lee, don't fly home too fast.
Last year's Golden Palm winner, Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11," dominated festival headlines and fed on the divisions surrounding the presidential election campaign. This year, international critics have been buzzing enthusiastically about ''The Power of Nightmares," British filmmaker Adam Curtis's documentary, which essentially takes up where Moore left off.
The film looks at two groups -- radical Islamists and American neoconservatives -- and how each used fear as a powerful tool. It claims that the Al Qaeda terrorist network is largely a phantom organization created by the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies to justify the military invasion of Iraq and other antiterrorism policies.
What makes this movie more significant than a liberal storm in a festival teacup is an overture from
Also in the Cannes spotlight this week was Charlotte Rampling, who turned a robust, sexy 60 in February.
Thanks to well-received roles in 2000's ''Under the Sand" and 2003's ''Swimming Pool," Rampling has enjoyed something of an international renaissance. She's garnered a passel of positives here for her role as a bitter, disconsolate woman in ''Lemming."
''You gallop in [to Cannes] and it's a bit like the Wild West," Rampling said. ''Everything and nothing can happen. It can be delirious or dreadful, sometimes in the [same] minute. I love that challenge."
Rampling prefers it here, she said, because French culture values the beauty of older women on television and in the movies, especially compared with Hollywood. ''They don't allow women to evolve, to grow up," she said. ''They want them always to be plastic children."
