point of no return
by Douglas Messerli
Guillermo
Arriaga (screenplay), Tommy Lee Jones (director) The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada / 2005
Despite
its receiving the prestigious Cannes awards for best actor (Tommy Lee Jones)
and best screenplay (Guillermo Arriaga), Jones’ debut directorial feature, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is one of those films that seems
destined to become forgotten over time.
Indeed I might have never seen it were it not that my companion, Howard
Fox, bought home a copy of the DVD which I found the other day after several
years of hiding in the shelves of our cinema favorites, still unwrapped. Why
did Howard buy this film, I wondered, since even he has not requested to see it
in all this time. Fortunately, I still have a great deal of curiosity, and sat
down to watch it immediately.
Like its rather cumbersome title, Jones’
film may put off some potential viewers simply by the fact that its genre isn’t
easily apparent. Yes, the work is akin to the films of Sam Pec6uuykinpah or the
fictions of Cormac McCarthy, and like many of those creators’ works might be
described as a contemporary Western.
So much of this work is in Spanish,
however, that it might also be even described as a foreign film directed by an
American. And at many times, the work seems closer to a Richard Linklater-like
satire of Texas life such as his Bernie.
Yet Bernie felt more comically
down-home that does Jones’ often very literary film, which not only evokes the
ghost of William Faulkner’s As I Lay
Dying, but, unlike most Hollywood films, toggles back and forth between the
recent past and the present through many of its early scenes, experimentally
reimagines scenes from different perspectives, and interlinks several of the
central figures in ways that are not apparent to the characters themselves,
creating somewhat old-fashioned ironic situations.
The hard-working, straight forward ranch
manager, Peter Perkins (Jones), unlike many of his Texas neighbors, seems to
have a close kinship with Mexican culture, speaking the language fluently and
being unafraid to hire on a “wetback,” Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo) with
whom he almost immediately bonds, sharing a kind of bromance moment with him by
introducing him to his married girlfriend, Rachel (Melissa Leo) and a new woman
in town, Lou Ann Norton (January Jones), who he has no way of knowing is the
wife of a new Cincinnati-born border guard, Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) who will
soon, unintentionally, kill his friend.
Although Rachel clearly enjoys Perkins’
gentle company, she is hardly particular about the men in her life, claiming
also to truly love her elderly husband, Bob (Richard Andrew Jones), who runs a
local diner, and regularly having sex with the Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam).
Like Rachel, Lou Ann perceives the sexual event as an alternative to the
increasing boredom of her life in border town of Vernon, Texas, as her husband
daily grows more and more mentally unloosed.
One of the earliest scenes in the film
reveals how the rookie border patrolman Norton is having a hard time of
separating his policing duties from excessive violence, as he runs down two
escaping would-be Mexican illegal immigrants, beating both the man and the
woman, breaking the nose of the latter. The old timer’s look at those few who
escape with tolerance—“somebody has to pick the strawberries”—while clearly
Norton feels those who get away indicate his failure. His commander sums it up,
“You were way overboard there, boy.”
We soon discover just how “overboard”
Norton truly is, when older border patrolmen, observing a coyote eating
something, discover that they’re gnawing on a recently buried body, that of
Perkins’ Mexican friend, whom he has previously promised to take back to the
small Mexican village of Jiménez if Melquiades died on this side of the border.
Perkins soon perceives that the local
police have no intention of seeking out the murderer of his friend, and, after
being shown the bullets which probably killed Melquiades, perceives his friend
has likely been killed by one of the border patrolmen. Rachel, overhearing the
border patrol leaders confiding that one of their men as killed the Mexican,
reports it to Perkins, who, when his fears confirmed, takes direct action of
his own, kidnapping Norton, and typing up his wife.
The
remainder of this complex film becomes, accordingly, a kind of pilgrimage of
purgation, wherein Perkins ritualistic forces Norton to take a voyage not only with but into his friends’ life. After
demanding that the hand-cuffed border patrolman dig up Melquiades from his
second burial, he takes the body and Norton back to Melquiades squalid home,
insisting he sit at his place at the table, drink from his cup, and, soon
after, put on the dead man’s own clothing, before setting out with Norton and
the body to find his friend’s small Mexican hometown.
The sheer forlorn beauty of the landscape
and their adventures along the way now take this film into almost mythical
territory, as are tracked, first by Belmont and later by the border guard
soldiers. Fearing for his life and terrified by the difficulties of their
travel, Norton is asked by the elder to suffer the same indignities as the
immigrants like Melquiades have. If sometimes these lessons in empathy seem a
little too pat—as when the two men come across some young Mexican cowboys
huddled around a broken television set watching the same soap opera which
Norton had been watching while he brutally fucked his wife—others are spot on.
Like a scene out of Frankenstein
(with their own Frankenstein-like monster in tow), the two come across an old
blind American who sits near his shack listening to Mexican music, the words to
which he cannot comprehend. Like the blind man in Frankenstein, he offers them everything he has, which includes coffee
and an evidently an unpleasant tasting gruel. And since the corpse they are
carrying is quickly rotting, he provides them with anti-freeze which Perkins
pumps through the dead man’s mouth into his veins. But when they begin the
leave, the blind man—having previously told them that his son visits once a
month to bring him food and necessities—admits that his son has not come for
more than a year, and, since he believes the son has since died of cancer, begs
them to kill him. He would gladly kill himself, but as a religious man cannot
disappoint his god. Perkins, so we perceive, is also a man of belief, if not a
man of god, and refuses the task.