Did you know that Tommy Lee Jones can speak Spanish?
If you've seen "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," you just may have picked up this factoid, along with a myriad of other important life lessons. Amongst these would be to never travel through the Chihuahuan Desert without a destination in mind and that never - under any circumstances - is it a good idea to bury your dead best friend more than twice.
"Three Burials" delivers these axioms within the context of the story of Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones), a ranch hand from southern Texas. Perkins is obliged to fulfill the promise he made to bury his friend Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo) in his native Mexico when the latter man is mysteriously killed.
Of course, before Perkins sets out for the Rio Grande with Melquiades' corpse in tow, he tracks down the Border Patrolman (Barry Pepper) who shot Melquiades, puts him through a gamut of near-fatal physical torture, and kidnaps the poor devil to bring along for the ride.
If it sounds a little farfetched, that's because it is. Unfortunately, seasoned writer Guillermo Arriaga, the same man that brought us rich character studies like 2003's "21 Grams," matches the outlandish premise with a spate of equally extreme personalities who embody the very best and worst of human nature all at once.
From the greasy spoon waitress who routinely cheats on her poor, unwitting husband Bob to the disenchanted housewife married to Melquiades' killer, all of Arriaga's characters are truly wretched creatures whose lives are mostly dismal, depressing and bitter. Though their existences are occasionally shot through with extreme moments of pleasure, the world Arriaga creates in the border town of Van Horn, Texas is so vulgar and brutal that few people will be able to identify with any of the characters.
However, the tremendously talented cast salvages the relationship with the audience. Since the film is light on dialogue, most of the emotion in "Three Burials" is derived from wistful looks, long sighs and absent-minded flicks of a cigarette, and the actors use these little things to soften their characters.
Melissa Leo and January Jones shine as the film's female leads, bittersweetly conveying two women's struggle to find happiness in the harsh, testosterone-fueled corruption of a backwards desert town. The two ladies represent different sides of the same coin. Leo plays Rachel, the adulterous middle-aged waitress whose dead-end marriage forces her to compensate for her disappointment with liberal amounts of carnal pleasure. Jones' character, Lou Ann Norton, is also stuck in a loveless relationship, but the idealism of youth buoys her hopes to get something more out of life.
Barry Pepper, graduate of war epics like "Saving Private Ryan" (1998) and "We Were Soldiers" (2002), still totes a gun in "Three Burials," but the similarities stop there. Pepper departs from his usual good-guy persona as the only character to undergo a significant personality transformation from a horny, callous buffoon to a humble and caring individual. Perkins forces Norton to pay for his wrongful killing of Melquiades with intense physical and emotional anguish, and Pepper manages to make the audience feel every snake bite and pistol whipping he has to suffer through in order to pay for his sins.
And call it beginner's luck, but Jones turns in a performance that simultaneously ends his downward spiral into mediocrity and marks what could be the start of a promising career on the other side of the camera. A far cry from his performance in his last film, 2005's "Man of the House," Jones treats his "Three Burials" character with poignant sensitivity, playing the borderline-neurotic Pete Perkins with equal parts dogmatic loyalty and human feeling. And half the time he does it in Spanish.
On the directorial end of things, Jones proves more than capable. His quick transitions between scenes balance the sweeping landscapes and lingering close-ups to keep the pacing fresh. And his decision to show the events of Melquiades' shooting out of sequence adds a light-hearted indie slant to the first half of the movie.
But all the good performances can't change the fact that, while "Three Burials" is a quality film, it's far from being an entertaining movie. Like the characters themselves, "Three Burials" is mostly dark and brutal with unsettling bursts of tenderness and humor.
Sure, brutality and humor are both essential parts of the human experience, but when you cram them both into the same movie, the result is too volatile to be realistic. You can appreciate "Three Burials" as a work of art while you're watching it, but it's not a film that you'd ever want to see more than once in a lifetime, and probably not something you'd recommend to a friend.
And yeah, we get it: life is filled with random twists and turns - but those chance happenings don't always have to end up in a week-long trek through the desert filled with meaningless tragedies, spiritual epiphanies and a rotting corpse.
