March 28, 2006
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
A Philosophy Runs Through It
In the world of popular culture, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada [2006] seems to be buried itself, given that films about cowboys, patriarchy, racism and unlikely coincidences currently overpower the cinema landscape. A shame, because this debut feature by Tommy Lee Jones, from a script by Guillermo Arriaga, dashes along Brokeback Mountain rather nicely, if never surpassing it, and it is better than Crash by leaps and bounds.
The film follows Tommy Lee Jones as Pete Perkins, an aging gringo cowboy in a small border town found in today's Texas, and his unyielding posthumous devotion to his friend, the murdered Mexican illegal Melquiades Estrada [Julio Cedillo]. We learn very little about Perkins, and even less about Estrada; their times together are provided primarily in flashback.
The film provides more back story for a young gringo Midwestern couple, Mike and Lou Ann Norton [Barry Pepper and January Jones], who have arrived in town because of Mike's new job with the Border patrol. Mike wastes away at work in a jeep reading porn, surrounded by the bleakness of the borderlands, his boredom interrupted only by his infrequent violent outbursts at the illegal immigrants he is after. Lou Ann, equally bored, sucks on cigarettes daily at a local diner, and finds what little comfort she can in shopping trips to a nearby mall.
When Estrada is killed and Mike Norton is implicated, the only person who seems to have any sense of purpose is Pete Perkins. But as Perkin's revenge fantasies slowly unravel, we're left questioning even his purpose by the film's close.
Whereas the beautiful mountains of Brokeback are full of meaning for its star-crossed protagonists — captured as they are on a postcard in Ennis Del Mar's trailer — the endless vistas and plateaus of Three Burials are empty, at least to its characters. Both to Perkins — working his way to Mexico to bury Estrada — and to the immigrants — working their way to America to bury their economic woes — the meaning of the hills of Three Burials lies in what is found beyond them, in the dreams of the traveler. The same philosophy is invoked in the film's narrative structure, divided into four parts by title cards: "The First Burial...", "The Second...", "The Journey," and finally "The Third Burial...". Given that we know so little about Estrada himself, the meaning of each of his burials lies mainly with who is doing the burying — first his murderer, then the State, and finally his friend Perkins.
This all became much clearer to me when I learned (thanks to IMDB trivia) that Jones had his cast read Albert Camus's Existentialist standard The Stranger. Camus's book tells the tale of an aloof man who kills someone and doesn't feel much of anything after doing so. Existentialism espouses the meaninglessness of the world, and The Stranger is supposed to represent one man's relationship to that reality. But I'm hardly schooled in Existentialism, nor the American Western genre, so all the intellectual implications of an existentialist cowboy tale aren't all that apparent to me. The little that I know of capital E Existentialism came to me from a college professor who insisted that a short story by Patricia Highsmith, which detailed a success-obsessed accountant's desire to murder his disabled son, had less to do with patriarchy and more to do with some sort of "existential river of despair" we all apparently swim in. I wasn't convinced then, and after Three Burials, I'm still somewhat wary of tales that attribute our social problems to empty dreams and universal feelings of alienation. For instance, Jones never fully portrays the material reality of Mexico that drives so many to risk their lives in crossing the borderto the U.S., an essential point that may be a casualty of the film's philosophy.
Still, it is great to see a Hollywood actor like Jones, in his first take as a director, bypassing the Ron Howard route and taking on a decidedly unHollywood picture, probably reneging on any chances at big time success (i.e. Oscars) in the process. Early in the film, as Pete Perkin's grapples with the loss of Estrada, Jones stares straight into the camera in a most affecting way. It really drew me in, but in a dreamy way that Jones never quite replicates again. The film's style is uneven - some scenes seem intricately staged, others meander - but it's a mistake that's easy to to see as the result of a rookie director.
Beyond style, Three Burials is at its best when it shows how alienation is tethered to larger systems of power — for instance, the patriarchy of Mike Norton and his porno mags, or the capitalism of Lou Ann Norton's mall excursions. In this way, the film is better crafted, more competent and far more convincing than Crash. The themes that Three Burials marshals against the border are especially timely — as Perkin's travels across the land, the border would appear nonexistent, if not for the border patrol constantly on his tail. And while Melquiades Estrada often seems to exist more in Perkin's mind than anywhere else, the issue of illegal immigration is handled without malice. With macho meatheads like the Minutemen loading up their semiautomatics in self-styled service to the State, the more films that humanize the human impacts of the border, the better. It's only that the eventual ambiguity of Three Burials left me feeling empty. The existential river of despair may well be a dry one.
