WARNING - THIS REVIEW DISCUSSES THE ENDING There are some films that you just don't know what to make of at first. The Western period or otherwise remains the definitive genre for portraying warped morality plays packed with layered themes and dense symbolism, but I found this one more difficult than many. I feel that to appreciate a film I have to get to grips with the leading players' motivations, but in a film where the supposed hero is a lunatic who's blown an unremarkable event up to absurd levels, what am I supposed to do? The answer is to constantly ask questions about the film. The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada offers no particular answers of its own, but it remains accommodating to whichever possibilities you wish to assign it. The lead question, of course, is what has driven Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones) to such extreme measures. Whether the attitude of Patrolman Norton (Barry Pepper) ever actually changes is another obvious one. But this is a film on which obvious answers to obvious questions are only going to shed a limited amount of light. Why, for example, the cuts back to the dessicated border town, where the citizens have no way to pass the time except to sit in a diner and smoke, or to have casual sex with people in motel rooms? Most importantly, what would Pete do if Melquiades (Julio Cedillo) had been buried in a pauper's grave having died of a heart attack? In the end I came away very impressed, but still feeling that I'd missed many of the nuances.
The first half of the film uses complex chronological fragmentation to give the viewer an immense amount of information in a small space of time, by allowing us (for example) to observe an event knowing what its consequences are going to be. It also disrupts any sense of empathy by not allowing us to watch the characters' emotions progress in a linear fashion; in a sense, these early scenes become semi-independent vignettes. They allow us to identify early on what turns out (retrospectively, to the characters) to be a key scene: a promise that rancher Pete makes to his illegal immigrant labourer Melquiades to take his body home should he die in America. This fateful conversation takes a central role in Pete's motivations when Melquiades is later accidentally shot and killed by pig-headed border patrolman Mike Norton in a moment of carelessness. When Pete learns who killed his friend, and realises that the local police don't plan to do anything about it, he decides to take matters into his own hands.
So far so good. But Pete's idea of revenge is anything but simple. It's not enough to gun down Mike, as Mike did Melquiades. Mike must be shriven. He must suffer in the desert. He must realise exactly what he did. As his estranged wife Lou Ann (January Jones) lounges in a diner muttering through her ennui that her husband is "beyond redemption", he is busy atoning for his sins (albeit against his will) by returning the festering corpse of his accidental victim back to his home village. If my use of religious terms seems pretentious, then I'd like to point out that there's a scene where Mike is dunked in a river. Admittedly he's dragged through it by a horse, but I never claimed that allusions have to be airtight. We don't like Mike, but we grow to sympathise with him. He's certainly closer to being redeemed at the end of the film than Lou Ann is. That might just be what drives Pete to his extreme course of action, of kidnapping Mike, digging up Melquiades and carrying them both off on horseback towards Mexico: however insane, at least someone in the town is actually doing something. As such the old man in the desert, begging to be euthanised, becomes a weird, living prophecy of the town's future; he could easily be all that's left of a similarly dead town, in a symbolic sense at least.
What takes the film deeper into surrealism is the ending, where it is revealed that Melquiades, to an unknown extent and for unknown reasons, has lied to Pete. The little village of Jiménez, where he wanted to be buried, doesn't exist. The woman he claimed was his wife is nothing of the sort, and cannot understand how Pete has come to possess a photograph of herself and her children. As it happens this is only a minor setback for Pete, who quickly locates a suitable spot out in the hills that looks about right based on the background of the photograph he's got. And like that, with Melquiades's final burial, the film is virtually over. It just lingers on the face of Norton, whose brutal "lesson" is now complete, asking the departing Pete if he'll be okay. He has gone from the film's least sympathetic character to it's virtual hero, a man who made a terrible error through thoughtlessness and was made to pay for it in the most painful way possible. A satisfying transition to watch.
The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada is a grotesque and extremely complicated portrait of a madman out to do the right thing in a world where right and wrong have been hopelessly skewed. This meaty concept is what makes it such a satisfying film, and why there's still very little that can top a good Western.
The first half of the film uses complex chronological fragmentation to give the viewer an immense amount of information in a small space of time, by allowing us (for example) to observe an event knowing what its consequences are going to be. It also disrupts any sense of empathy by not allowing us to watch the characters' emotions progress in a linear fashion; in a sense, these early scenes become semi-independent vignettes. They allow us to identify early on what turns out (retrospectively, to the characters) to be a key scene: a promise that rancher Pete makes to his illegal immigrant labourer Melquiades to take his body home should he die in America. This fateful conversation takes a central role in Pete's motivations when Melquiades is later accidentally shot and killed by pig-headed border patrolman Mike Norton in a moment of carelessness. When Pete learns who killed his friend, and realises that the local police don't plan to do anything about it, he decides to take matters into his own hands.
So far so good. But Pete's idea of revenge is anything but simple. It's not enough to gun down Mike, as Mike did Melquiades. Mike must be shriven. He must suffer in the desert. He must realise exactly what he did. As his estranged wife Lou Ann (January Jones) lounges in a diner muttering through her ennui that her husband is "beyond redemption", he is busy atoning for his sins (albeit against his will) by returning the festering corpse of his accidental victim back to his home village. If my use of religious terms seems pretentious, then I'd like to point out that there's a scene where Mike is dunked in a river. Admittedly he's dragged through it by a horse, but I never claimed that allusions have to be airtight. We don't like Mike, but we grow to sympathise with him. He's certainly closer to being redeemed at the end of the film than Lou Ann is. That might just be what drives Pete to his extreme course of action, of kidnapping Mike, digging up Melquiades and carrying them both off on horseback towards Mexico: however insane, at least someone in the town is actually doing something. As such the old man in the desert, begging to be euthanised, becomes a weird, living prophecy of the town's future; he could easily be all that's left of a similarly dead town, in a symbolic sense at least.
What takes the film deeper into surrealism is the ending, where it is revealed that Melquiades, to an unknown extent and for unknown reasons, has lied to Pete. The little village of Jiménez, where he wanted to be buried, doesn't exist. The woman he claimed was his wife is nothing of the sort, and cannot understand how Pete has come to possess a photograph of herself and her children. As it happens this is only a minor setback for Pete, who quickly locates a suitable spot out in the hills that looks about right based on the background of the photograph he's got. And like that, with Melquiades's final burial, the film is virtually over. It just lingers on the face of Norton, whose brutal "lesson" is now complete, asking the departing Pete if he'll be okay. He has gone from the film's least sympathetic character to it's virtual hero, a man who made a terrible error through thoughtlessness and was made to pay for it in the most painful way possible. A satisfying transition to watch.
The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada is a grotesque and extremely complicated portrait of a madman out to do the right thing in a world where right and wrong have been hopelessly skewed. This meaty concept is what makes it such a satisfying film, and why there's still very little that can top a good Western.