>>PREVIEW
THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIDAS ESTRADAS
STARRING Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Dwight Yoakam and January Jones
DIRECTED BY Tommy Lee Jones
Opens Friday, March 10
Uptown Screen
The Three Burials of Melquidas Estradas is a good movie – only a few misssteps prevent it from being a great one.
Guillermo Alliaga scripts another non-linear ensemble tale of love and redemption to complement his previous creations, Amores Perros and 21 Grams. This time honing in on the plights of those living in a small Texas border town, Alliaga frames this contemporary western around one straight cowboy and his heterosexual love for another straight farmhand.
Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) is a white-trash border patrolman who moves to this dreary little town to start a new job with his perky but perpetually bored wife. To pass the time, his wife hangs out at the local diner where waitress Rachael (Melissa Leo), a loving wife, passes the time by sleeping with her regulars. They include Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones), an austere rancher growing ever tired from weathering the storm of life, and Belmont, the "inadequate sheriff" played by Dwight Yoakam.
Sex is a means to an end in this film. Nowhere is that more apparent than when Mike, over-stimulated by an encounter with Hustler magazine, accidentally shoots and kills Pete’s sole companion in life, the aforementioned Melquidas Estradas (Julio Cedillo), thus setting our story in motion. Discouraged by the indifference expressed by the border patrol and law enforcement towards his friend’s murder, Pete kidnaps corpse and killer alike and saddles up for a journey of poetic reckoning.
The missteps took place in the editing room. The first half of the film is exposition told using a fractured editing style that feels superfluous. The second half could have benefited from some imagery of the desolate environment, and should have avoided the temptation to use the rotting corpse as a vehicle for black humour. These changes, accompanied by a sound mix that placed more emphasis on raw, diegetic sound (the empty thud of hooves on parched, dry earth, the push of the wind against exposed bodies), would have heightened the deep, meditative atmosphere the film strives for.
But the film is serviced by strong performances all around (including the understated gravity of Jones), and a script that succeeds in emotionally interconnecting the struggles of conflicting characters while avoiding the trappings of over-bearing archetypes and coincidences to force a theme.
There are a few memorable moments worth noting as well. One poignant scene involving Levon Helm as a haggard, blind hermit, slowly decaying in the desert, lingers in your heart long after he’s faded from the screen. The other is an ironic scene involving the Sheriff, who, after having Pete in the sights of his rifle, has second thoughts. Then, while lying on his back in the middle of nowhere, reproaching himself for his lack of resolve, he receives a booty call on his cell from their shared mistress.
I’ve heard some criticize the film’s portrayal of the white law enforcement as violent, aggressive and ignorant while viewing the Mexican illegals in a much gentler light. That irks me. We’ve spent a century degrading and stereotyping minorities on film and it’s damn time Hollywood started giving them a voice. |
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