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In addition to directing, Jones plays Pete Perkins, a Texas rancher who, following the death of his jolly pal Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo), is compelled to unearth the Mexican’s corpse in order to honor Mel’s request to be buried back home where his wife and children live without him. Estrada was shot by Mike Norton (played with ubiquitous grimace by Barry Pepper), a Texas border guard who has just moved into town, and finds living in a trailer with his highschool-sweetheart/desperate-housewife to be a rather dull affair; humdrum days are only made sporadically rousing when Norton gets enough blood circulating to perform an impossibly quick fuck with his listless bride while watching a bad American soap-opera, or when he gets the opportunity to thwack some Mexican women over the head as they try to cross the desert border into Texas.

Norton’s a heartless sonofabitch, clearly, but Perkins is noble to a Western-hero tee; well, except for his sexual dalliances. Perkins and Estrada roll around Texas hotels with a couple of otherwise enervated workin’ gals, one of whom (the woman Estrada nervously sleeps with) is Norton’s wife (played ultra-ditzy by January Jones). The lass Perkins seduces is a local waitress who also sleeps around on her aging husband (though he’s completely aware of this) with the dimwit Sheriff (appropriately played by Dwight Yoakum) and probably a few more townsfolk.

Arriaga’s time-shuffling script fractures these various plotlines into a series of answers, questions, explanations and elaborations. He fiddles around with our ingrained knowledge of Western storytelling by setting the film in present day Texas, and catering to modern-day cinematic conventions. The death of Estrada, therefore, is given a Tarantinian (rather than a Fordian or Boetticherian) treatment. Instead of seeing what happened, where it happened, and why it happened, Arriaga instead flashes brief moments of hearsay amongst subjective views of Estrada's shooting. A standard set of queries for Tarantino has always been: who shot who, when-where-why. Conversely, a standard Western would build up the emotional and thematic importance of (1) who has gotten shot (and by whom), (2) where the shooting took place, (3) why they got shot when they did, and (4) why it was necessary to have a shootout at all – only after all this information was duly absorbed would the .33’s come into play.

So, by undermining the emotional impact of the shooting via the splintered sequencing, Arriaga wants the audience to think back fleetingly to all that protracted squinting of Sergio Leone, to the Hawksian conception of black hats vs. white hats, and to the molasses murders of Sam Peckinpah. During this moment of reflection, I suppose we're supposed to chuckle silently - at least that's what I did.

Then, just as we think Jones is giving us a different spin on the Western, all this temporal jitterbugging stops and Arriaga’s script goes linear. The movie abruptly wanders into the point-A to point-B funeral march for Estrada, for which Perkins forces Norton to assist. The three men – two living, one very, very dead – trot along cliffs and desert, bumping into an array of characters straight out of classic dusters: a elderly, God-fearin’, blind man; a Mexican herbalist healer; a posse of cowboys drinking around a campfire.

However, even at this point the effects of historical progress and technological sprawl remind us that Tommy Lee Jones, not John Ford, is directing the picture. Hence, cell phones jangle as the crosshairs of high-powered rifles search for their would-be victims; antifreeze is poured down Estrada’s throat to stave off fire ants; a group of Mexicans at a campfire don’t spin stories, they watch the same bad American soap-opera Norton’s wife watched while he blandly boinked her. And appropriately, just as the film exits non-linear mode, the female characters (including Norton’s blasé wife) all but disappear. Even though technological the times have quite clearly been a changin’, the ideals of a Western being primarily a male-dominated genre are allowed to flourish again in Jones’s final reels.

By explicitly following the men, however, Jones demonstrates how the progress of civilization has even thrown the relationship between Norton and Perkins out of kilter. Though we have the old, stubborn John Wayne type swaggering recklessly against the opposing forces of man and nature in the name of doin’-what-a-man’s-gotta-do, Jones plays Perkins classically loyal and obstinate, as well as strangely liberal. Norton, by contrast, is the bigoted foil. The elder Ethan in Ford’s The Searchers took it for granted that anyone not-white was as useless as tits on a bull, whereas the elder in Three Burials has to explain to the young punk the values of racial tolerance.

Well, more than tolerance, in fact; Perkins wants Norton to understand (even if the barrel of a loaded gun is what will eventually convince him) that loyalty is a quality that extends beyond racial distinctions. Hence, if an Mexican pal of yours should happen to ask you if you’d bury him back in Mexico were he to die in Texas, by golly, you’d better cart his dead ass across the border when the bigoted American authorities fudge his funeral.

And, in the end, race is the subtle driving force of the movie. Three Burials investigates the sociological and political pressures that govern the distinctions between affluence and poverty, and the finicky details of immigration in a more narrative-friendly way than Michael Haneke’s recent Cache. Though Cache was ultimately a more in depth and textured work, Three Burials is nevertheless intriguing in its own separate, political ways. And even though it fails to pack any sort of emotional punch or catharsis, it’s a welcome addition to a genre that for so long has been criminally neglected.

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originally posted: 03/10/06 18:27:43
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