The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
The title of "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" sounds like a magical-realist novel from south of the border, and the movie attached to that title does eventually lift off into realms of whim and circumstance. Before then, it's a tough, observant little western of the sort they haven't made since the early 1960s, back when directors such as Budd Boetticher or the young Sam Peckinpah could turn out rawboned morality tales without losing their cool. Tommy Lee Jones makes his feature directing debut here, and the film is as weathered, subtle, and sympathetic as the actor's own face.
"Burials" is a story of the modern West, though, with the wide Texas landscape crowded out by country songs and errant wives, greasy spoons and hot-sheet motels. An old-fashioned cowpoke like Pete Perkins (Jones) is an anachronism, and he knows it. A foreman at a local ranch, Pete can get wild with Rachel (Melissa Leo), the married waitress at his favorite diner, but he only really connects with his ranch hands, particularly Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo), an easygoing Mexican illegal from Coahuila. Seen in flashbacks, the two men's friendship has a gentle dignity that sidesteps ethnicity, politics -- everything but the work and all that can be said through it.
To the forces of the law, Melquiades is just another migrant, and when he turns up shot to death in the film's opening scene, the local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam) can hardly rouse himself to care. Pete conducts his own increasingly distraught investigation, and his suspicions come to settle on a US border patrolman named Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), newly arrived from up north and wound tighter than a drum. Anyone intending to see "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" should probably stop reading now.
The first half of the movie is mostly shrewd, laconic character study. The script by Guillermo Arriaga, the great Mexican writer responsible for "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," lets the characters collide into one another: Pete, nearly weeping with unmanly frustration; Mike, bored and frightened, with "a face like a white rat," in the words of one border jumper unlucky enough to come up against him; Mike's wife, Lou Ann (January Jones), young and blond and not quite as empty as everyone assumes; Rachel, whom Leo plays as a sort of evolved floozy; Melquiades, who haunts those who meet him even while he's alive.
The second half of the movie crosses into Mexico and metaphor. Having pledged to return Melquiades's body to the tiny village from which he came, Pete pistol-whips Mike into coming along for the ride, and the byplay between the cowboy, his handcuffed captive, and the rapidly decaying corpse is grimly comic. The journey takes on an allegorical cast, moving slowly across a full range of American and Mexican border archetypes: a blind Anglo settler (Levon Helm of the Band, looking older than God); a pretty, fed-up young healer (Vanessa Bauche); a group of Mexican cowboys watching a soap opera they don't understand. Pete seems to get stronger the farther he goes, just as Mike's hardness peels off, layer by layer.
It's a simple enough story, and one that Jones directs with a minimum of fuss. This is trim, lean filmmaking; one of the few times the filmmaker gets artsy, oddly, is with sound design, in a Mexican bar scene where the ambient noise forms a lovely, otherwordly rush of sensation.
By then, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" is about to step off into poetry, and I wish I could say that Jones handles it as well as everything up to that point. Underneath the grizzled exterior of both film and director beats a romantic heart, though, and while the penultimate scenes of the movie are meant to be ambiguous, in the playing they're fairly slack.
But that's a minor criticism, one that Jones's next movie should fix with any luck. As a director, he's the real deal -- trustful of his cast and collaborators (who notably include cinematographer Chris Menges), attentive to the hard specifics of character and place and narrative, and willing to take chances when the wind seems right. Anything more is just showboating.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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