Tuesday, November 10, 2009

ACROSS THE BORDER

Thirty-five years after his first film role in 1970, native Texan actor Tommy Lee Jones directed his first film in 2005. The result, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is the only feature-length theatrical film he has directed thus far in his career, but is hopefully not his last. Jones also stars in the film, playing the bilingual Pete Perkins, a grizzled ranch foreman in Cibolo County, Texas who has befriended the titular character, played by Julio Cedillo, a ranch hand from Mexico. Melquiades arrives in Texas as an undocumented immigrant looking for work. Pete hires him and the two eventually strike up a friendship. Unfortunately when Melquiades is unexpectedly shot and killed, Pete must identify the body, which prompts him to unravel the circumstances behind his friend’s death.

The Three Burials was scripted by the talented writer Guillermo Arriaga, whose previous writing credits include Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006). Arriaga’s time-fractured method of storytelling continues here and serves the material well. The Three Burials also stars Barry Pepper (Saving Private Ryan) as border patrol agent Mike Norton, January Jones (before her breakout role on television’s Mad Men) as his wife Lou Ann Norton, and Dwight Yoakam (Sling Blade) as Sheriff Frank Belmont.

Once Pete discovers he had no help from the Sheriff and that the insensitive boarder patrol agent, Mike Norton, is resposnible for his friend’s death, Pete forces Mike to exhume Melquiades’ body and return him to his family. The Three Burials is very much concerned with immigration but does so in a humanistic and empathic way. Mike, while he is captive, is forced to traverse the same paths as the immigrants he attempts to apprehend and thus comes face-to-face with their realities and struggles. Although this modern Western focuses on an old cowboy’s quest to fulfill his promise to his murdered friend, it is also about Mike’s redemption.

Cinematographers Chris Menges and Hector Ortega capture some gorgeous and desolate scenery in small towns and the countryside for near the Texas-Mexico border for the film. One scene in particular exemplifies Pete’s loneliness in the aftermath of his only friend’s death. Across the border, in a cantina at dusk, Pete wistfully gazes out at the surrounding countryside from his barstool. After getting up, he stumbles to the telephone to make a phone call with a drunken confession of love to the woman he left behind in Texas. The combination of the normally stoic Pete’s vulnerability, the lighting in the cantina, and the haunting music provided by a piano-playing girl make it the film’s most enduring image.

As part of the Cinema Arts Festival Houston, writer Guillermo Arriaga will present The Three Burials... at the MFAH on 11/13 (6:45pm).

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