The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Rated: R
Website: http://www.sonyclassics.com/threeburials/
Release Date: 2006-02-24
Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Julio Cedillo, Vanessa Bauche, Dwight Yoakam, Barry Tubb
Director: Tommy Lee Jones
Screenwriter: Guillermo Arriaga
WorkNameSort: Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The
Our Rating: 4.00

A satisfying little morality play about prejudice and responsibility, Burials casts Tommy Lee Jones as a Texas ranch hand who loses his saintly Mexican buddy (Julio Cedillo) to the errant trigger finger of a brutal border guard (Barry Pepper). For Jones’ Pete Perkins, moral equilibrium entails returning the dead man’s corpse to the land of his birth – and hauling his killer along for a lesson in how the other half lives. While Guillermo Arriaga’s mildly disorienting script lacks the temporally upended magic of his Amores perros or 21 Grams, Jones, in his first outing as a director, demonstrates admirable restraint. Demurring from leaning too hard on the movie’s liberal ideology or pulling any flamboyant moves that scream, “Look at me DIRECT,” he’s simply made a movie he kinda thinks you ought to see, maybe. And that avoidance of messianic auteurism could be why he’s getting almost no awards play.

This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2006.