The 3 Burials Of Melquiades Estrada
  
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a stunning success and fully deserved its two awards that it collected at Cannes, one for best actor (Tommy Lee Jones) and the other for best screenplay (Guillermo Arriaga). Tommy Lee Jones (in his big screen debut as a director) creates a ferociously entertaining deconstruction of the West that begins deep in Peckinpah territory, but soon forges its own unique and queerly beautiful path.

The film begins with the discovery of a man’s body. We meet him in flashbacks. He is Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo), an illegal immigrant who has come to Texas to work cattle and send his paycheck back home to Mexico. Melquiades is sweet-tempered, hard-working and loyal, qualities that endear him to reserved ranch supervisor Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones). The two soon become best friends. When Pete learns that his pal was shot and left to die in the desert, he starts looking for explanations, especially since the local law (Dwight Yoakam) isn’t about to break a sweat investigating the death of an illegal. The trail leads Pete to a thuggish young border patrol officer, Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), who has just moved to town with his bored, blond baby of a wife (January Jones). Pete kidnaps Mike at gunpoint, orders him to exhume Melquiades’s body from its pauper’s grave and then saddles up for the long ride to Mexico. His plan is to have Mike, who claims the shooting was accidental, rebury Melquiades in his native village.

The script by Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros and 21 Grams) jumps to flashbacks without warning and expects the audience to catch up with it. Thanks to Jones' unhurried and focused direction, you do. As Pete tracks down an angry, city-born Border Patrolman, Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), and hauls him across the border along with the decaying corpse of Melquiades during his odyssey, Jones whittles away the branching side tales until these three are all that is left.

In one of the film's most challenging, idiosyncratic scene, the shadow of Mary Shelley looms when Pete and Mike come upon a blind hermit (played in a poignant miniature performance by drummer Levon Helm of The Band) with a odd request that uniquely tests Pete's stubborn determination to set things right. This scene could have been easily spoilt, the fact that is not is a tribute to the movie’s rough poetry.

Ultimately, this is a fantastic, darkly comic and moving film. Tommy Lee Jones shows major skills as both a director and an actor. His accomplishment as Pete Perkins is probably the greatest of his career. It is a mournful, sad and lonely performance full of pain and heartache, much like the film.

  
Paul Elliott