IF YOU GO TO THE cinema to acquaint yourself with interesting and novel methods of torture and humiliation, then have I got a movie for you–especially if, for an added bonus, you enjoy the thought that the person being tortured and humiliated is a law-enforcement officer employed by the government of the United States.
The film in question has a title so wretched that I can guarantee you the theater will be four-fifths empty when you go to see it. It’s called The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and it’s not a negligible piece of work by any means. It’s a genuine labor of love, a gorgeously photographed and haunting study of the border between Texas and Mexico and the people who live and work there. And it’s shot through with an ornery originality that seems to emanate from its director and star, Tommy Lee Jones, who is among the most ornery and original American actors.
When asked why he would saddle his film with such a difficult name, Jones responded, “I like the title. If I were going to change it, I’d make it longer. It’s a mouthful, and that’s a good thing. I prefer to use the Spanish title, Los Tres Entierros de Melquiades Estrada. And if you can’t say that, you need to see the movie twice.”
It’s understandable that Jones would want you to see his film twice, but after two hours of watching him and his screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga, devise new ways to punish the movie’s central character, many moviegoers will have to think hard about whether they might want to attend a movie ever again.
The subject of the movie’s wrath is Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), a young Border Patrolman who has just moved to a West Texas town with his pretty and pliable young wife. With a military crew cut, a joyless sneer on his face, a dehumanizing approach to making love to his wife and a copy of Hustler in his pocket for the long and lonely hours on patrol, Norton is a nasty piece of work. He seems to have joined the Border Patrol so that, while apprehending illegal aliens near the border, he can beat them up. And we see him doing just that to a lovely young woman.
“You were way out of line, boy,” says Norton’s superior officer.
“She was attempting to escape,” Norton says, falsely.
One morning, Norton climbs out of his car in a remote valley with his Hustler in his hand when he hears gunshots. The shooter is Melquiades Estrada, a ranch hand and illegal alien who was shooting at a coyote to protect his goats. Norton assumes he is being targeted and kills Melquiades. He leaves the man’s body there, but is stricken with a sickening guilt that makes the gulf between him and his wife even larger.
Melquiades’s best friend is Pete Perkins (Jones), the ranch foreman. Perkins has promised to return Melquiades’s body to his wife and children in Mexico if he died in the United States. And when he learns that Norton has killed his friend and isn’t going to be punished for it–the local sheriff goes on vacation to avoid the whole matter–Perkins takes matters into his own hands.
Perkins kidnaps Norton and makes the Border Patrolman join him on a journey by horse to Mexico with the rotting body of Melquiades in tow. And here is what happens to Norton:
He is forced to dig up the body, causing a great deal of vomiting. He is handcuffed and beaten on three occasions by Pete Perkins. He runs away from Perkins and is stalked by him. He is starved. He gets bitten by a rattlesnake. He is assaulted by a Mexican woman who helps cure him of his snakebite. (She’s the woman he punched when she was trying to cross the border.)
The point here, of course, is that Norton’s treatment is cosmic payback–not for the killing of Melquiades, which was an accident, but for his own cruelty, racism, and soullessness. The torture he endures and the pain he suffers are, it turns out, intended to purify him. Melquiades died so that Mike Norton could live.
That’s all well and good, but through most of the movie, what you’re seeing is a man being punished and punished and punished–and a director who is taking lascivious pleasure in the pain he is inflicting. Like Sam Peckinpah, the director to whose extraordinarily violent Westerns The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada pays explicit homage, Jones loves the violence he shows so much that it makes his outraged depiction of Mike Norton’s own cruelty a little hypocritical.
And more than a little political. In the world according to Tommy Lee Jones, the Americans of West Texas are all corrupt, crazy, mean, or stupid. The Border Patrol is, at best, incompetent and, at worst, evil. And the Mexicans? Well, they’re wonderful, all of them, from strangers on the road offering food and drink to the Christ-like Melquiades himself.
Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga has said he wanted “to make a study in social contrast between the land that’s south of the Rio Grande river and the land that’s north of it.” The contrast is that the land north of the Rio Grande is far too impure to hold the sainted corpse of Melquiades Estrada, who tells Pete with disgust that he doesn’t want to be buried amidst all the “billboards.”
I’m an open-borders guy myself. But really, if Melquiades Estrada hated it so much here, all he had to do was jump on his horse and ride right on back to Mexico. The same goes for Guillermo Arriaga.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
