The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

Where to begin with this hopelessly mediocre attempt at a meaningful movie? I think the best place to start is with the critics. After all, director/star Tommy Lee Jones didn't set out to make a poorly paced, racist film totally lacking in credibility. The people to blame would be those who are supposed to be able to evaluate this kind of material with some degree of discrimination and warn the rest of us away from it. Many of them claimed that this naked emperor of a movie was clad in finery. What was truly astounding was the degree to which this film was mis-evaluated. One critic wrote that the film was packed with "note-perfect performances." I'll skip over the obvious limitations of some of the other performers in the film and get right to Dwight Yoakum's portrayal of the sheriff. It is arguably the worst performance ever recorded on film. I'm not just talking about major films. I will include Ed Wood's films, Tom Green's performances, your home movies, infomercials, and local used car salesmen doing their late-night TV commercials. There may be a worse performance in there somewhere, but I have never seen it. Now if a critic sees a 75/100 and calls it a 100/100 that is one thing. We can attribute that to a variance of opinion. But when a critic sees a 0/100 and praises it as "note-perfect," you just have to think that the lad is in the wrong profession. Yoakum's performance is so monotonous and stilted that he almost makes Tommie Lee Jones seem Shakespearian. Tommie Lee, of course, turns in his usual laconic, inexpressive performance, and Barry Pepper goes in the other direction, totally over-the-top as the despicable American border guard who bullies illegals and kills Tommie Lee's best friend, then turns into a whiny, cryin' bitch when Tommie Lee kidnaps him.

On the other hand, the acting didn't really stand out as worse than the script. It was awarded the best screenplay award at Cannes, which is pretty much all you have to know. That fact is virtually a guarantee that a a script will take a minimalist approach to plot and character development, will be needlessly convoluted in narrative technique, and will have a simple-minded, negative view of Americans. Bingo! This particular award winner is worse than usual. Every male American in it (except Tommie Lee) is hateful or stupid or fat or incompetent or impotent, often several of the above, each of them living a dull, meaningless, hopeless life.  Every Mexican is self-sacrificing, gentle, forgiving, and generous, caring for their families, putting in a fair day's work for a decent wage, filled with love and respect for one another as well as for outsiders. Needless to say, there were critics who looked at the film's simplistic black-and-white weltanschauung and praised it for its nuances. If the entire scenario weren't racist enough to begin with, the script reinforces the point by including such lines as Tommie Lee calling the border guard "you stupid gringo." Mind you, that line was spoken by the film's conscience.

For those of you who do not understand how the film community defines nuance, here are some examples:

• "You stupid wetback spic." Racist and evil. When a character says this, we know he is bad.
• "You stupid gringo." Sharp, edgy, nuanced dialogue. When a character says this, we know he is our hero.
• "Chinese people are evil." Racist.
• "Americans are evil." Nuanced and award-winning.
• "Black people are evil." Racist.
• "White people are evil." Nuanced.

And so forth.

Oh, yeah, and then there are the preposterous coincidences. The border guard shoots Melquiades Estrada because he thinks Estrada is shooting at him. As it turns out, Estrada was trying to kill a nearby coyote. The important fact for us to note here is that the border guard's wife was so bored by life in West Texas that she has decided to do some semi-professional light hooking, half for pleasure, half for profit. I'll bet you'll never guess who her first (and only?) john was. Yup, that's right, the border guard accidentally shot the one other guy who was having sex with his wife, unbeknownst to him

You're not impressed with that coincidence? OK, try this one on for size. Early in the film, the border guard uses excessive force on an escaping illegal alien, a young woman whom he punches right in the face. Later in the film, deep inside Mexico, the guard is bitten by a snake and the only one who can save him is ... oh, I'll bet you can guess. I suppose that the screenwriter of this film just thought Crash was too darned plausible! Need I point out that some critics referred to this as "gritty realism"?

Here's the general plot outline:

A border guard carelessly shoots a man, Melquiades Estrada, who appears to be shooting at him, but is actually shooting at a coyote. The officer basically leaves the dead body to rot in the desert. His decomposing, half-eaten corpse is found by some hunters. The dead man, an illegal alien, turns out to be the greatest human being since Francis of Assisi. During his saintly life he extracted a promise from his best friend (Tommie Lee) to bury him in Mexico if he were to die in America. Tommie Lee finds out how his friend died, kidnaps the border patrol officer, forces him to dig up the corpse, and together they drag the rotting corpse of Melquiades Estrada toward a tiny village in Mexico. Tommie Lee treats his decomposing friend as a nine year old girl might treat her Barbies, dressing him up, combing his hair, and talking to him along the route. If you are a Sam Peckinpaugh fan, you may hear some echoes of a film called "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia."

The script fails, not only because of the outlandish coincidences and one-dimensional point of view, but also because of a simple lack of sensible character motivation. The one element that strains the credibility of the film to the absolute breaking point is the fact that Tommie Lee never asks his prisoner how the crucial killing happened, and the border patrol guard never tells him until the last couple of minutes of the film. If they had ever discussed it, it would have resulted in an Emily Litella moment. "Oh, never mind."

There is more bad news. Tommie Lee's direction of this film didn't help it, either. The two-hour film drags on and on and on until it feels like four. There is some good news. The cinematography is excellent.

The film grossed $5 million in an arthouse run which maxed out at 350 theaters.

C-.  A painfully slow, simplistic, and borderline racist film which was greatly overpraised by the turtleneck set. It obviously has its defenders. In fact, most critics liked it and the IMDb rating is an impressive 7.9 - good enough to make the Top 250 if it gets enough votes!

 

Melissa Leo

 

Other Crap:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

Lifespan (1974)

* If you're reading this on Wednesday, you've already lost.



Monday at the zoo in Kiev, Russia, a man lowered himself into the lion enclosure on a rope, shouting, "God will save me, if He exists!"  He then took off his shoes and marched right up to the lions.  One lioness immediately pounced on him, severed his carotid artery, and mauled him to death.

*  The flaw in his logic? The lioness had been thinking, "God will feed me, if He exists."



Lawyers for Lady Heather McCartney denied a report that she'd once posed for a German hardcore porn book, claiming it was a "lover's guide" to instruct couples in caring relationships.  The Sun tabloid replied that their copy is all photos, many unprintable, and there's not a word of text.

*  Hey, it's a sex manual for illiterates.

*  I think we can all agree that no matter what these photos are, the
important thing is that Yoko Ono didn't pose for them.