I Shoulda Stayed in the 90's: The Three Absurdities of Melquiades Estrada

Um.

I must admit, I was expecting something more closely resembling a Western.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a feature-film directing debut by and starring Tommy Lee Jones, with support from Barry Pepper. The premise holds a lot of promise: an old cowboy named Pete (Jones) hires and befriends a young illegal immigrant who, several years later, is accidentally shot and killed by border patrolman Mike Norton (Pepper). This drives Pete to what can only be reasonably described as vengeful insanity - upon learning who shot Melquiades, he invades Norton's home and abducts him at gunpoint, and proceeds to make him dig up the body and bring it with him back to the place Melquiades had asked to be buried should he die in America. Over the next several days, Pete drags Mike on a gruelling, fugitive horseback trip to Mexico, torturing him at every opportunity both mentally and physically, as he continues to, shall we say, "lose it". This is definitely an absurdist tale, but also definitely not the kind of absurdism I like. It's less Tim Burton and classic British storytelling and more Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee.

The character development had a strong potential to be very interesting; instead, it is disconnected and sparse. The first act spends a lot of time establishing a raft of ultimately useless secondaries like Pete's disgruntled, fickle wife, a sherrif who for some reason hates Pete, and the local diner waitress, whose part consists of sleeping with both Pete and the sherrif, apparently to the full knowledge of her husband. Fortunately, it also gives us some insights into who Pete and Mike are. Unfortunately, it never goes anywhere with them. We learn that Mike was popular in high school, finds his wife attractive but still reads Hustler, is either violently racist or merely takes his job way to seriously (this is never made clear), and feels really, really bad about killing Melquiades; however, none of these traits really come into play later on. We learn that Pete is a simple man with a highly developed sense of tunnel vision, a sense which exponentially increases with each act of the story. These guys could have been really interesting; unfortunately, the writer wasn't concerned with exploring their motivations, not even what it is that makes Pete so violently disturbed. It's hard to appreciate a film in which there are no characters worth liking when their characters aren't sufficiently fleshed out.

Also, one of the producers is, for some reason, Luc Besson, which means a notable amount of random female nudity. Also, I believe roughly 70% (if not more) of the dialogue was obscenities, which is, frankly, not a very engaging writing style. Mike swearing a lot doesn't actually do anything to a) advance the story or b) teach me more about who Mike is. I found myself getting bored on more than one occasion.

There are a few interesting elements to this story, but hardly enough, in my opinion, to warrant watching it unfold. What you really want to do is rent it so that you can watch it with the commentary on. The commentary is delivered by Jones, Dwight Yoakam, who played the inconsequential sherrif and sounds really, really stoned here, and January Jones, who play's Mike's wife, and sounds like what would happen if you put three people in a room with lots of beer and lots of pot and told them to talk about a movie. For example, at the climax of the film, instead of talking about, say, the climax of the film, we get January Jones helpfully informing us that they filmed the end on the actual last day of filming, and asking Tommy how they get dirt to shoot up when people fire fake guns at it. Then Dwight says a lot of things that make no sense, the way artists who are trying to sound artsy talk about stuff, ie. sounding exceptionally stoned. Then he talks about horses. Then Tommy talks a bit about how he likes the editor. Then there was something about vacationing in the Bahamas. Seriously, folks, I'm ready to start a contest to find a more useless commentary - it would make an awesome episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. This level of inanity and sheer disconnection is fortunately hard to come by.

If you feel a deep urge to finally see Barry Pepper in a non-World War II film, or feel like laughing your head off at the commentary track, by all means rent The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. If you want to watch an interesting, masterful contemporary Western starring Tommy Lee Jones, then buy No Country for Old Men. There's some irony in the fact that Ben Affleck has set the bar for actors trying their hands at directing with Gone Baby Gone, yet a far superior actor turns out...this. White is black, black is white, bad actors make great directors...my world is awry!