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Never mind George Bush and his cowboy diplomacy. Never mind that Tommy Lee Jones roomed with Al Gore at an Ivy League school. In The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrade, staged, fictional as it may be, you will see, in a most unlikely era, perhaps the most authentic cowboy-concept the screen has ever produced.
The cowboy as portrayed by Jones is once again, as he used to be, the Western paragon of honor and authenticity, knowing what's right and unfazed by man's law. The twist is that the world has become so debased that this sense of honor now looks like google-eyed lunacy. It is literally one man against the world; not one man against a group, or against a microcosm, with a good woman waiting at the end of the line and children who will restore order and civilization ( the only time we hear a child speak in this film, he yelps "Go--amn bastard a--hole!" ) This cowboy is as alone as God. He may, in fact, be just that, and his outwardly vile actions -- such as his queasily comical attempts to preserve Melquiades's body -- may or may not prove to have some larger point, or even a prima causa.
*SPOILERS ALERT*
Pete Perkins and Melquiades Estrada are in love, but this isn't Brokeback Mountain -- it is a brotherly love that they share. Melquiades refuses all possessions like a Tibetan monk, giving Pete his best horse on a whim, living in a shack with a bare lightbulb, and dying with a buck and change in his pocket. When he's killed by Barry Pepper's Border Patrol officer, Perkins will undergo what apparently seems a mission of revenge, dragging Pepper and the body of Melquiades across half of Mexico in order to return the body to his wife in his hometown of Jimenez. But does Jimenez exist? Did Melquiades even have a wife? The mission becomes a quixotic -- I use the term advisedly -- search for a city that doesn't exist to honor a love that isn't sexual, satisfies no needs and therefore cannot be seen. When Perkins and his prisoner reach a scrubby area with a few rock formations that might have once been houses, Perkins pretends to recognize Melquiades' description of Jimenez, a place between two hills "so beautiful that once you see it, you'll never forget it." Pepper thinks he's crazy. This place is not pleasing to the eye. But in the end, he will be left weeping and begging Melquiades's forgiveness with the fervor of Dreyer's Joan of Arc. And the last line from his mouth, the last line we hear from a man who is stranded in the middle of nowhere with a mutilated foot and scars up and down his face, and the last line in the movie is "Are you going to be all right?"
*END SPOILERS*
There's no other way to say it -- this is not only a film that reclaims the cowboy from those who use the image unwisely and inauthentically, but more crucially, takes back Christianity as well, the kind of Christianity that isn't bruited about to win votes, power and money but reveals itself through actions like a chain that connects past, present and future to an unknown source. The cowboy is the samurai is the monk is the knight of infinite faith. Recasting the events of the film back in your mind, you realize that the movie was about the salvation of Barry Pepper's soul, here idealized as the average American -- a product of his sterile, telegenic environment, one hand down his pants and the other on the trigger of a gun, unable to satisfy his wife because he is closed off from his potential, but with a kernel of goodness that can only be brought out through a sort of limit-experience, which is where "crazy" Pete Perkins comes in.
It is telling that Pepper nearly dies of a rattlesnake bite before having the poison sucked out by a Mexican woman he'd previously clobbered in the face when she attempted to cross the border. The next shot shows a brief glimpse of the reconciliation of all opposites, as everyone sits together and shucks corn, reminding me of the moment in The Little Foxes when all the patient, suffering characters gather on the patio for one brief moment before Bette Davis's mercenary shrew breaks them up again. There's a couple dozen more shots that deserve mention but space is limited. Suffice to say that Jones is not just a solid actor's director, like Eastwood, but an inspired visionary who can achieve exotic Baudelairean effects.
If it's really true that Tommy Lee Jones is gearing up to direct Blood Meridian, for which the times are more than ripe, and for which he is indeed the man required, this macabre yet blissful vision is the ideal primer. It gives us a little something to hope for, illusory as it may seem, before dropping us into hell -- which, like Martin Scorsese, Jones unmistakably believes in and fears.
score 10/10
Delly 8 February 2006
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1287233/ |
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2-12-2019 07:48:30