Movie Review: "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada"

by Jeff McGinnis, Lead Usher

***1/2 stars (out of four)
121 minutes, Now Showing

There’s this one song by Harry Chapin entitled “Corey’s Coming.” The song is a folk ballad (of course, being by Harry Chapin) about a pair of somewhat unlikely friends - an old man who works as a guard at a railroad station and a kid who comes by every now and then just to hang out and hear stories. The underlying story of the song is about how this old man shares tales of his past with this kid - you know, before I got stuck HERE, I had all these amazing adventures. The kid begins to share in these experiences, and they eventually become as big a part of his life as they are in the old man’s - whether they are true or not being another matter entirely.

I thought of this song as I watched “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” the new film from Tommy Lee Jones. This movie is also, at its core, about a close friendship between two unlikely parties - a old rancher named Pete (played by Jones) and an immigrant worker named Melquiades (Julio Cedillo). A unique kinship develops between the two as they work together, and they begin to share stories about their lives, Melquiades in particular regaling Pete with tales of his former home back in Mexico, and the family he left behind. Melquiades makes Pete promise that if he should ever die while still in America, Pete needs to take him back there.

Given the title, we can deduce that Pete will, in fact, be called upon to make this journey before the film is over, and we are correct. But it will be nothing like we, or Pete, expects - indeed, the movie is nothing like we can really expect. For one thing, Melquiades’s death comes at the hands of a border patrol guard named Mike (Barry Pepper). He didn’t mean it, mind you - he was just a little distracted, heard some shots and returned fire. The fact that Melquiades was merely firing at a prairie dog that was threatening his herd did not occur to Mike at the time. We’re not sure if Mike is a genuinely evil man or merely a thoughtless one - we see him being ridiculously brutal to some illegal immigrants he captures, and his general demeanor seems to indicate that he thinks they were asking for it. He also perceives himself as a loving husband, though his wife (January Jones) practically screams her disagreement through her body language.

The first half of the film is spent establishing all these characters, and their relationships to one another (in many ways) through a series of intercut scenes from various points in the story. We begin with the discovery of Melquiades’s body, then flashback to meeting him, establishing his relationship with Pete, introducing Mike and his wife, as well as other characters such as the local waitress Rachael (Melissa Leo) who seems to be sleeping with everyone, and observes the events surrounding Melquiades’s murder with a watchful eye. The editing is disjointed but not disorienting - we never feel as though the movie is telling us the events in this order to confuse us, but merely to introduce the information in the order of its importance to the narrative.

The second half of the movie begins when Pete learns through Rachael that Mike is the killer, and that the police seem to be planning to do nothing about it. Pete’s reaction to this is not at all what we are expecting - he proceeds to kidnap Mike and force him to help bring Melquiades’s body back to his hometown in Mexico. He keeps insisting that if Mike tries to run, he’ll kill him, but we somehow know that Mike’s death is not part of Pete’s plan - and his actions when Mike DOES try to run bear this out. This portion of the movie is a much more straightforward and traditional narrative, but the story itself serves up more than its fair share of surprises.

The film has an easy, relaxed confidence in its story and tells it in a matter-of-fact tone, which makes grisly details (like the exhumation and transportation of a rotting corpse over the U.S.-Mexico border) not only bearable, but entertaining. Pepper’s border guard keeps a steady level of gall and disgust at the task at hand, but Jones as Pete still relates to Melquiades as his friend, who he loves and wants to protect - he just happens to be dead now, thank you very much. His state of mind reflects a combination of righteousness and delusion, as evidenced by his reaction when he and Mike finally arrive at their destination.

Jones emerges as an interesting filmmaker, this being his first feature (a made-for-TV movie back in 1995 is his only previous directing credit). He does not overpower the material or over think the story - he tells it in a relatively realistic tone and lets it speak for itself. The frequent use of flashbacks without some kind of obvious visual cue as to when they are taking place may seem to some like an amateurish choice, but if one reflects on the technique, one realizes that it’s really a tribute to the respect the film has for the audience - the filmmakers presume that the viewers are intelligent enough to catch on to the storytelling technique, and determine when something happened, simply by virtue of the relationships and characters. It makes us invest ourselves more quickly in the events.

If the film has a flaw, it comes in its conclusion, which is of course the one part of the movie that I absolutely cannot drop even the slightest hints about. I will merely note that the film ends somewhat abruptly, and a longer denouement would have been welcome. But in a film as rich in characters and events as this, the point lies not in the destination, but in the journey. My guess is, by the end of the film, Pete is thinking much the same thing.