The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada was a difficult film to sit through. I'm not sure why I didn't walk out. To say the film is stoic is a gross understatement. The lack of emotion lent itself to an overall mood of apathetic nihilism. If the actors and the filmmaker don't care about anything; why should the audience?
I like things that are left unresolved. I like stories that refrain from textual explanations. I willingly accept a few conceits in order to get to the bigger issues. I had no problem with Matt Dillon pulling Thandie Newton out of the burning car in Crash, for example.
But in Three Burials nearly every cut was a conceit. Now we're here. Now we're there. Now he's running away. Now she's in a motel room with the man her husband has killed in a flashforward and will kill again in a flashback. Oh, so it's just a coincidence that the ornery border patrol killed the Mexican (a goat herder, goat in Spanish is cabron. Cabron also means cuckold) with whom his bored and neglected wife recently had a tryst.
Having just gone through rewriting a single script with producers and agents for the past three years, I'm a bit resentful. Guillermo Arriaga seems to get away with things that I can't. He has been called the Mexican Tarantino for his temporal shifts. I enjoyed them in Amores Perros. I didn't see 21 grams. In Three Burials the jumps in time don't serve anything. The filmmakers are trying to create a murder mystery where there is none. You can't really say what this film is about in any tidy way. In the past I thought that was pure Hollywood horseshit to essentialize. But I don't think that so much anymore. An old fool by the name of Aristotle seemed to think unity of action was important.
Is this film is about returning a friend to his home after he's been murdered? Or about making another man pay for his sins? Or about making a man that doesn't believe in hell, believe in it? Is it a morality play? (Definitely) What are the consequences for Tommy Lee Jone's character? Where are the seeds of his moral ambivalence? How does he move from affable to cold-hearted? Why the blind man? Why the second scene with the blind man?
This last question offers a clue to the lavish praise and awards bestowed on the film and its makers -- there is much mythologizing in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Critics and festival panels (French panelists especially) love mythmakers. There is plenty of symbolism - Melquiades as goat herder being one of the more subtle examples. Other symbols were far less subtle - the impotent sheriff, the border patrol officer masturbating, the mobile homes, the telenovela. The pack horse falling was brutal, hackneyed in its motivation and an inelegant rip-off of Bunuel's Las Hurdes.
Speaking of the symbol of the pack horse falling, I will concede that otherwise Jones handled poverty evenhandedly. I also enjoyed the way the Mexicans were presented - as full-blown human beings for once. Though the coyote was given a sympathetic point of view that I don't believe is in any way deserved by a man that earns his living preying on simple folk.
The coyote scenes were among so many moments where I said to myself, You've got to be kidding me.
After seeing a film like this I appreciate reading film critics for insights to which I might have been blind. In the case of Last Days, the critics helped me be patient with Van Sant's meditative film and to see its achievment. Reading that this film is one of the best of the year and even of the past decade, does not inspire deeper appreciation.
I love westerns. John Ford and Sam Peckinpah were certainly laconic and they told stories to support that emotion, where the lack thereof spoke volumes. Mentioning Tommy Lee Jones and his subtext-lite film alongside those greats is infuriating. As are the raptures regarding Ang Lee's direction of Brokeback Mountain.
Nobody ever raised a statue for a critic.
Viva
Signore Direttore
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