Movie: The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada
General Info
Title: The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada
Year: 2005
(image from Apple Trailers)
In Short
Melquaides Estrada, an illegal alien is shot dead and his friend and colleague Pete wants to give him a decent burial. This takes quite some effort, because he promised Melquaides he’d bury him in the village he was born, on the other side of the border.
The Movie
Visuals
A Modern Western with all the visual treats: dry desert landscapes, incredible mountain ranges, muted colors, wide and narrow shots.. Combined with a very strong depiction of life in Nowheresville, West Texas - excellent!
Plot
Well, an innocent man is shot dead and his friend tries to solve the mystery. Once solved, the body is taken across the border in a quest to find the proper burial place.
Why three burials? Well, the first one’s where the body’s found and so on..
So, no mind-boggling stuff, just the Pure Things That Matter like friendship, honor, revenge, etc. We’re talking Westerns here, not Eisenstein (come to think of it: would there be any significant difference?)
First-time director and lead actor Tommy Lee Jones and “Amores Perros” scribe Guillermo Arriaga present a clear story with interesting developments.
Cast
Tommy Lee Jones does what he does best in portraying a wise, frustrated man with a strong sense of duty and obligation who’s kinda broken up by grief. His strong presence carries quite a large part of the movie. Interesting parts by Barry Pepper, Dwight Yoakam as the sheriff and Melissa Leo as the.. well.. smartest character of the cast, I guess..
Not really impressed by January Jones‘ performance..
Conclusion
Western Quest: it works, providing you can keep people interested during the whole enterprise and that didn’t really always work that well. I liked the direction, although some of the scenes were a bit crudely edited, don’t know if that’s done on purpose but it kinda missed its mark sometimes. But the plot was good enough and the acting was solid.
I missed this one during the Rotterdam Film Festival (it was on my list..) and I’m glad I got the chance to see it afterwards. Decent movie, not the wrong type of ego-project, but the right one: there’s a sense of really caring about the movie and the whole process of making it.
Rating: 
