30 March 2007
Director: Tommy Lee Jones
Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam, January Jones
Rating: 15
Length: 121 minutes
Country: USA/France

Tommy Lee Jones turns director for The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada, a thoughtful modern Western exploring death, delusion and friendship. He's Pete Perkins, a rancher stricken by grief when his Mexican employee and friend Mel (Julio Cedillo) is killed. Enraged by official indifference at the death of this illegal immigrant, he sets out to fulfil a promise by taking the corpse home to Mexico - with an unwilling prisoner, Border Patrolman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), in tow.

The film is filled with affection for the land - it was shot partly on Jones' own West Texas ranch - and a clear-eyed view of the relationship between America and Mexico; the affluent bully exploiting its poor neighbour (although even on an allegorical level it retains a pleasing ambiguity). There is also a terrific sense for small lives filled with frustration and the inherent First World racism that says life only really matters if it is White. The notoriously gruff Jones would no doubt dismiss such talk as guff and maybe he would be right. Whatever: this gripping film about real people is well-worth excavating.

Guillermo Arriaga's dramatic and poetic script weaves past and present as it gradually reveals a great friendship, the lonely subterfuge of an illegal migrant's life, the cost of a promise made and kept, and culminates in the redemption of a callous if accidental killer. The US/Mexico border has long been plagued with violence and racism, and many of the events that unfold in The three burials of Melquiades Estrada are accurate depictions of the ongoing abuse of human rights in the region. But the film offers, in its conclusion, a pure form of contrition for wrongs committed, and a striking note of empathy for the lives so changed.

See also:

¡Viva Border Volleyball! There are plenty of grim sites out there about the Mexican-American border and the plight of illegal immigrants, but what you really wanted to read about and see was an over-the-wall game of volleyball played on a Tijuana beach. See the video clip, and while you're at it, follow the link at the bottom to the National Network for Immigration and Refugee Rights, for a little dose of cold reality.