The First Burial of Tommy Lee Jones’ Directorial Credibility: “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada”
Tommy Lee Jones’ directorial coming-out party is at worst a disaster and at best a swing-and-a-miss. The comic scenes aren’t funny, the dramatic scenes aren’t gripping, and key sections of the movie are neither insightful nor interesting. The result is a cliche-ridden unintelligent film that happens to benefit from pretty cinematography and a promising enough storyline to make you keep hoping that it gets better. Unfortunately, it never does.
Here’s the story: Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) is a border patrol agent who just took on a job in middle-of-nowhere Texas. While on patrol, he recklessly responds to gunshots he hears in the distance and unintentionally kills Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo), an illegal migrant worker who was just trying to keep a fox or coyote or something away from his goats. Unfortunately for Norton, Melquiades worked for Pete Perkins (Jones) and had become his best friend. Doubly unfortunate for Norton is that Pete finds out he did it, kidnaps him, makes him dig Melquiades’ body up, and then take a ride through Mexico on horseback in order to bury the body in Melquiades’ home town.
This basic story has the potential to be a great Western morality play but it is dragged down into superficiality by watered-down writing (”21 Grams” writer Guillermo Arriaga is certainly not in top form here) and confused directing. One rightly expects the centerpiece of the film to be a long soul-searching journey, but these scenes deliver on nothing but length. Not a word of meaningful dialogue is ever exchanged on this multiple-day trip and no interesting moral questions are ever adequately addressed. What does Pete think about death and redemption? How would he respond if Norton told him what really happened (i.e. that Norton is at worst guilty of being irresponsible and jumpy)? Would it make a difference to him? What does Norton think of Pete’s brand of justice (beyond frequently shouting “you’re insane!”)? Before the kidnapping, we are given numerous well-acted and well-done scenes intended to express Norton’s remorse–but why doesn’t he tell this to Pete right off the bat? And since he does feel remorse, why does this remain a hostage situation? Doesn’t his own remorse suggest that he would eventually realize that this trip may spell redemption for him too? If he ever does realize what is going on, it is much too late in the film.
The problem here isn’t just that the film is too shallow (it is) but that it is also simply implausible. These unasked, unaddressed, and unanswered questions are obvious, not subtle. These two guys spend a LOT of time together, and Norton never really asks Pete what they are doing or why, never makes much of an effort to tell him what happened, takes way too long to express the remorse the audience knows that he has been long in feeling, is overly subservient to Pete, etc. Without reason, Norton is convinced that Jones’ character is ready to kill him, but the entire point of this trip requires that Pete keep Norton alive. It is as if the script keeps the Pepper character in the dark in order to either maintain this plot point or to avoid having to include thoughtfully relevant things that these guys would actually say to each other.
(And to claim that these two characters are simply too grizzled or laconic for even a simple moral discussion is not just a cop-out but is also patently ridiculous: during the course of the film, not one but BOTH are shown crying! Aside from this, no portion of the film has a gritty enough tone to even include such character types; it is more “Open Range” or “Lonesome Dove” than “Unforgiven” or “The Wild Bunch.”)
Furthermore, the kidnapping itself is hard to swallow. We are given no reason to believe that Pete is capable of this beyond the many scenes establishing his loyalty to his fallen friend. These scenes are enough to establish love and friendship, but do not even come close to suggesting that Pete has ever even committed an act of violence in his life.
The treatment of Norton as a character is just as confused. We are shown numerous instances of him being a jerk–his uncontrollable temper prompts him to beat up illegal immigrants; he is an unloving husband to his utterly-unnecessary-to-the-story-wife; he is probably racist–but NONE of these characteristics factor into the shooting. They simply make us not like Norton, similar to the the way that the pre-kidnapping scenes of Pete make us like him. The result is that the centerpiece of the film amounts to “Guy We Like is Moral and Does Right Thing / Guy We Don’t Like Learns a Lesson.” Flatly relying upon this formula is bad enough; but it’s worse when the equation doesn’t even balance out properly. If anything, Norton only really “learns” that “Mexican Immigrants are people too,” mostly in an horribly-eye-rolling piece of Symbolism that appropriately involves shucking corn (if intentionally comic–which is what I hope but don’t believe is the case–the scene is at best incoherently out of place). But since his racism has absolutely nothing to do with Estrada’s death, one wonders what the point of this “learning experience” is and what themes the movie really wants to address.
I suspect that the filmakers intended this to be “in part” a social commentary film, but failed to put their cards on the table. The result is a film that should have centered around two fully-developed characters but ends up being over-burdened with cheezy melodramatic sequences that are all but subtitled with “this is the Message.” The lesson here is that, if you are going to make an Issue picture, make an Issue picture; if not, then only address Issues insofar as this directly and naturally falls out of the experiences of, well-written, interesting characters. The anything-but-subtle “Crash” succeeds at the former; the refreshingly-free-from-melodrama, character-driven “Brokeback Mountain” succeeds at the latter. “Three Burials” succeeds at neither.
All of this is a shame, since the ending kind of works and the basic premise is fantastic. The film suffers from trying to address too many themes (included are: racism, small-town isolation, immigration, and personal responsibility) and ends up doing a movie-of-the-week level job with all of them. The story requires a simpler, more sparsely produced film that deals with the interesting moral questions that are naturally generated from its basic premise. It does not need the distracting side-stories involving local cops, Norton’s wife, and the waitress at the local diner–and it certainly does not need the Tarantino-esque non-linear narrative style that Arriaga put to better use in “21 Grams” but employs needlessly and distractingly here.
Much of Jones’ acting work has bascially relied upon second-rate imitations of Clint Eastwood and Harvey Keitel. He would have been better served by at least trying to copy the former’s directing-style as well; the simplicity that worked so well for “Unforgiven” and “Million Dollar Baby” would have done wonders with this material. Alas.
One-and-a-half out of four arbitrarily chosen stars.