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The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada review by Sam Osborn of www.samseescinema.com
rating: 3.5 out of 4
Director: Tommy Lee Jones Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cedillo, Melissa Leo, January Jones Screenplay: Guillermo Arriaga MPAA Classification: R (language, violence and sexuality)
It takes a certain director to pull off a Guillermo Arriaga script. 21 Grams and Amores Perros were both helmed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (who will soon lead Babel, another Arriaga project), directing them both with a gritty, handheld realism that shook us all roughly in our boots. Arriaga's characters are generally rich and full, mean and real; but mostly just beautiful. His characters are human, to say it plainly. Tommy Lee Jones grudgingly took the director's chair for this Arriaga script, but executes it with a steady sureness of hand, proving to us that his Harvard education really was worth something. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a stubbornly engaging film, yanking us into its bordertown culture with a coarse smattering of characters that all unfurl with delicious intertwining. And we can trust such a hefty handful of characters in the palms of Arriaga, who assuredly knows how to knot his characters up in the most painfully elegant of ways.
Along with directing and producing the picture, Tommy Lee Jones also plays the lead role. His character is Pete Perkins, a cattle rancher working just miles from the border. He's unmarried, but has found love in Rachel (Melissa Leo), the married waitress at the Sands Motel Diner. Also courting Rachel is Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam), whose main attribute would probably be laziness, a trait that pervades even his genitalia. The newcomers in town are Mike and Lou Ann Norton (Barry Pepper and January Jones) from Cincinnati; Mike finding work as an abusive, oversexed Border Patrol Officer. The title character, Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo), appears primarily in flashbacks, excepting his pervasive corpse seen throughout the picture. Estrada approaches Pete about work, having fled from his family in Mexico to find job as a ranch hand in Texas. Pete and Estrada strike an unlikely friendship, each of them beginning to understand culture from both sides of the Rio Grande. This ends, however, when Estrada is killed by Mike in a fatal misunderstanding. Pete at first relies on Belmont and the authorities to handle the proceedings, but soon realizes that the Sheriff's laziness has broadened also into justice. So Pete takes matters into his own hands and kidnaps Mike from his crumbling home with Lou Ann (who had been cheating earlier with Estrada), and forces him to dig Estrada from his informal burial in town, and travel on horseback into Jimenez village in Mexico to re-bury him there.
Arriaga's screenplays, at their foundations, deal with a human's journey. Amores Perros dealt with the journey of love (hence the translation of Amores Perros as Love's a Bitch), and 21 Grams dealt with the journey of redemption. Here Arriaga deals with a more tangible journey, as Pete, Mike, and the corpse of Estrada trek across the Texican desert, facilitating justice of the alternative sort. But as Pete and Mike leave town, Arriaga doesn't let us forget about those left behind. Lou Ann, Rachel, and Belmont's stories are all panned out successfully, each dealing with estrangement differently. Arriaga chooses even to keep up with a tiny fringe character seen in glimpses earlier in the film. His refusal to drop stories works to unfurl motives and development of Pete, Mike, and Estrada, their characters broadening as they cross the desert. This process is heightened by Arriaga's disowning of chronology. He takes on a milder version of 21 Grams' anachronous layout, inadvertently flashing backwards and forwards without warning. The method works to tell the story in terms of the characters' development, instead of storytelling on chronology's terms.
Grittiness always plays a factor in Arriaga's tales, but Three Burials deals with grittiness as a reality of culture of these characters. 21 Grams and Amores Perros found grittiness within a culture that generally avoids it, making it more disturbing (a trait that Three Burials hides in devices of culture). Tommy Lee Jones helps this element of the narrative along, offering us long, steady shots that refuse to cut in to close-ups to exude emotion. Jones knows the screenplay and his cast are strong enough to not worry about stylish direction. He takes the direction with a steady hand, allowing us to see the story's picture in shots often longer than 20 seconds long, while still avoiding the endless shots of the desert vistas common to travel films. His straightforward directing is refreshing amongst the Tony Scott and Wayne Kramers of recent, who assault us with frenetic jump cuts and fuzzy focus tricks. Jones allows us take a step back and let the script and acting take the reigns.
Speaking of acting, this is Jones' defining performance. His mannerisms and humor and sensitivity all take manifest in the character's endless determination to bury a friend that meant more to him than any audience could understand. He says little, but as all great western heroes, he doesn't need to. The remaining cast also do tremendously, particularly January Jones and Melissa Leo (who's easily mistaken for Holly Hunter). Their characters are inherently different-one accepting her lonely lifestyle and the other reacting against it-but their differences make them compatible and easy friends. They lend the brusqueness of the film a sincere touch that rounds out what makes an Arriaga screenplay great. Barry Pepper also does well, but also is required of less because his role calls more for teary, screaming theatrics than hard-earned acting bones. But Pepper has his quieter, more thoughtful scenes, and with those he succeeds.
Tommy Lee Jones has reported that he hates directing, which is a shame. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a magnificent achievement that solidifies Jones' career and proves his supreme validity. For Arriaga it's another swath of humanity carved into the paper of his script. On both accounts, the achievement is certainly noted.
-www.samseescinema.com
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