It’s not difficult to see why The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada might have trouble making a splash in US theatres. I mean, right up front the title is a mouthful. Past that, the story doesn’t just move at a deliberate pace, it often moves in and out of sequence at will. So, commercial it is not. But while its pacing presents a detriment to its exposure, it is also frequently its greatest asset.
Tommy Lee Jones’ directorial debut is a beautiful and haunting film that unfolds like a novel, slowly and richly, and you’ll soon find the way it moves becomes rhythmic and hypnotic.
Three Burials opens with the discovery of a man’s body, found rotting in the desert, and cuts back and forth between what happens following the discovery, and what led up to it.
Jones plays Pete, a ranch owner in a little border town in Texas. In an early scene we see him hire an illegal immigrant named Melquiades to help out with horses and the like, and the two quickly become good friends. After a misunderstanding with a border patrolman, Melquiades is found in the desert, dead and literally left to the wolves. When he finds out, Pete makes it his duty to find out who killed Melquiades and make sure his friend is given the funeral he requested- on a hill in a little town in Mexico.
This is mostly set-up, and at a certain point the opposing timelines of past and present meet, giving way to a sequence of Odyssian events through Mexico that are sublime, touching, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Jones directs like he acts – no nonsense – and he gets the tone pitch-perfect; a mash of Cormac McCarthy and Sam Peckinpah, where things are the way they are and morality is mutable when it comes to loyalty and honor.
Tommy Lee Jones is seen testing out his No Country ”simple-man” here and the character is all the better for it, (Jones won best actor at Cannes that year, along with Guillermo Arriaga for best screenplay). Pete takes no nonsense, never says anything he doesn’t mean, and leaves us constantly wondering if he is resolute or just insane. Also of note is Dwight Yoakam as a cranky racist Sheriff, and a pre-Oscar-nominated Melissa Leo, as a married woman who is sleeping with her husband, the Sheriff and Pete.
The ending doesn’t quite hit the mark, but I never got the impression that Three Burials was concerned with its final destination. This is a film about the journey - el viaje.
