The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Some films, for one reason or another, seem destined to forever elude the attentions of the wider moviegoing audience. I hope we don't have to wait long before Three Burials, Tommy Lee Jones' first foray into directing, is given the credit it is undoubtedly due. Despite winning two awards at Cannes in 2006 -- Best Actor for Jones and Best Screenplay for writer Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) -- Three Burials sneaked through cinemas then disappeared into the wilderness. It really is a gem, a true masterpiece that more than deserves a place in the canon of Hollywood's finest Westerns. And it's available on DVD for the price of a couple of pints. (For Blu-Ray, it's a mere ten notes.)

The story in summary (there is a more detailed synopsis here):
Tommy Lee Jones plays Pete Perkins, a rancher in West Texas and best friend and employer of Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo -- All The Pretty Horses), an illegal immigrant from Mexico. While tending to his goats, Melquiades is shot accidentally by Mike Norton of the US Border Patrol (Barry Pepper -- 25th Hour, Seven Pounds), who panics and buries the body in a shallow grave. The corpse is later found, and police from the local sheriff's office rebury it in the town's cemetery, but show no interest in investigating how the death occurred. Perkins discovers that Norton was responsible for the shooting, and so kidnaps him and forces him to exhume the body. With the decomposing corpse tied to a mule, Perkins takes Norton on a journey into Mexico to find Jimenez, Melquiades' hometown. (In one particular flashback -– the story is told out of sequence, and shifts back and forward through time in true Arriaga style -– Melquiades makes Perkins promise that, should he die, Perkins will carry him back across the border and bury him in Jimenez. (‘I don’t want to die here among all the fucking billboards’, Melquiades says.) After days of travelling through the desert on horseback with only a crudely drawn map for direction, they eventually find the place Perkins believes Melquiades’ was speaking of, and they bury the body for the third and final time.

It’s a stunning film, and everything just works. The cast is magnificent: Cedillo as Melquiades, shy, innocent but full of fear; Dwight Yoakam (Panic Room, Crank) as Sheriff Belmont, Perkins’ adversary and love rival, who struggles both with Perkins' flouting of the law, and his own erectile problems; January Jones (Mad Men) as Lou Ann, Norton's bored and neglected wife; Melissa Leo (21 Grams) as Rachel, the owner of the local diner, who befriends Lou Ann and, as a voice of experience, offers lessons in life; and Levon Helm of The Band, who has a heartbreaking cameo as an old man living out his days in a ramshackle house in the desert, blind, with only a Mexican radio station for company. However, particular mention must go to Barry Pepper, whose portrayal of Mike Norton is nigh-on perfect: tense, boorish, slightly sinister, but full of enough heart and raw emotion to gain the viewer's sympathy by the film's end. Perkins puts Norton through ordeal after ordeal -- often with great comic effect -- yet by the final scene there is no bitterness, hatred or need for revenge, only a new-found respect and concern for Perkins' own well-being. It's a wonderful performance.

Cinematographer Chris Menges expertly captures the unforgiving Texas landscape in all its searing glory. Tommy Lee Jones’ direction is assured and at ease: born and bred in San Saba, a small Texan town, he knows this environment and the people who inhabit it. The music is great too -- Marco Beltrami's stark, eerie score harks back to Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, and Ry Cooder's haunting slide-guitar accompaniment.

To me, this film is faultless, and superior both to the excellent Westerns that followed it -- 3.10 to Yuma, Appaloosa, The Assassination of Jesse James -- and to No Country for Old Men, an ideal companion piece that, despite its greatness, lacks the emotional depth or complexity of this masterpiece. Three Burials deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Unforgiven, the film that resuscitated an ailing genre, and we can only hope that Tommy Lee Jones someday returns to his seat behind the camera. On this evidence, there's nowhere I'd prefer him to be.