The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

I must confess to being sorely disappointed with this film which I approached with great expectation, since not only have the reviews been excellent, but Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed it, won a best actor award at Cannes, where it also won a best screenplay award for Guillermo Arriaga.  So what was the problem?  It certainly wasn't the fine cinematography or the fact that the film alternated betwee English and Spanish or even the fairly thin story.  Jones plays a Texas rancher who befriends an illegal Mexican labourer and when the latter is accidentally killed by a careless and brutal border guard (Barry Pepper), he not only decides to take justice into his own hands (since the local police don't give a damn), but also decides to honour his friend's request that he be buried in his home town.  So he abducts Pepper and forces him to dig up his friend from his second grave (the first having been a short-term matter of expediency) and to accompany him and the rapidly decaying corpse over the Border with Pepper's fellow border guards in lacksadaisical pursuit.  They eventually discover that neither Estrada's supposed family nor home town are real, but Jones feels at last that he has honoured his friendship.

Part of the problem I had with this movie was its very slow exposition, although I was not overly alienated by the to-ing and fro-ing of the time frame.  The main problem, I felt, was Jones himself who was just a tad laid-back from being a hero with whom one could identify or completely understand.  If anything, Pepper's was the better performance, especially since one came to believe that despite his cruel streak and Jones' abrupt treatment that he truly regretted Estrada's death.  The fact that the film just stopped after the third burial with Jones riding off and Pepper left in the middle of nowhere did not achieve the necessary closure.  An interesting but, I think, somewhat flawed attempt to make a classic Western.