Transfusion #5: Three Burials
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is thoughtfully engaging on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. On the most basic level, it's a Western, a tale of both redemption and revenge, depending on point-of-view. Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones, who stars and directs) hears that his friend and immigrant ranch hand, Melquiades Estrada, has been killed by the Border Patrol, and kidnaps the guilty patrolman, Mike Norton, enlisting him for the gruntwork of giving Melquiades a proper burial in Mexico as Melquiades had requested.
For Pete, it's a story of vengeance/closure as he seeks solace by carrying out the last wish of his ill-fated friend, specifically by forcing his killer to do the work and eventually ask forgiveness of the much-traveled corpse. Though it wouldn't seemingly be the primarily intended reading of the film, it's also possible to view it as a redemption story for patrolman Norton, who becomes a mensch only after enduring some truly horrific discipline at the hands of Pete, serving as some sort of divine figure for this reading of the film.
The primary reading includes all the most obvious themes of the story, namely the mistreatment of migrant laborers from Mexico, and the related issues that arise for both natives and Mexicans. What we get here that we don't get in Crash, for example, is a more complex, though not necessarily robust, characterization of the hard-working chicano than we're used to. We also see a continuum of attitudes by the white authorities toward foreign Spanish-speakers rather than a bifurcation of extreme caricatures. At this level I think the film works fairly well, but it's probably not great.
Mike Norton and his wife serve as a way for Jones and Guillermo Arriaga, the screenwriter, to discuss the underlying cultural values that may help fuel the clash between white Texans and Mexicans. Norton and his wife, Lou Ann, are callow mallrats from Cincinnati, recent transplants to the west Texas desert, and naively hopeful about their prospects. Their utter cluelessness serves over and over again as an indictment of the artificiality and disconnection from reality of consumer culture.
Lou Ann's relationship with Rachel, waitress at the local diner, reveals to us the shallowness of her point of view throughout her development, from naif to disenchanted (and neglected) spouse to the worn-out and defeated easterner who finally gives up and quits both the town and her lost husband. Her comment that Mike is "beyond redemption" seems both true and, ultimately, false, both shortsighted and immediately perceptive. Within the world she knows, her husband is indeed a sad and worthless deadbeat, but that also exposes the narrowness of her experience.
We get an early hint that Norton's unintentional act of manslaughter has changed him when he refuses to go shopping with Lou Ann after driving into Odessa, even as she reminds him, "You used to love the mall." He seems oddly resigned to his fate throughout his abduction and labor-intensive rite of passage, as if he knows innately that the world he is leaving behind is not one to be mourned or regretted.
Jones expresses his distaste for consumer culture visually and symbolically, as he forces Norton out of his regular clothes and into Melquiades' work shirt and pants. Memorable scenes include Norton slipping around in flip-flops recovering Melquiades' body from the freshly re-dug grave as the Friday night Midland high-school football game glows and rumbles in the background; Melquiades' confusion in the hotel room during a sexual liaison, arranged for him by Pete, with palm trees painted on the walls and porn on the TV, liberated finally by some south-of-the-border dance music from the clock radio; and the at-once obvious and poignant, and hilarious, moment when exhausted ex-bigot Norton, who began the film as a brutal enforcer of the border with the demented enthusiasm of an Abu Ghraib guard, sharing a bottle of whiskey with some friendly Mexican gauchos, and abruptly bursts into tears at a ridiculous soap opera his wife used to watch.
All this is to say nothing of the sheriff, the pickup truck-as-horse or the design of the dusty town filled with mobile homes and trailers and its visual link to the old cowtowns of Ford and Wayne, or even Leone and Eastwood. I've also mentioned very little about the powerful, quasi-religious transformation of Mike Norton as a biblical sort of figure (think Moses, Jonah, or Paul), wandering through the desert and put through severe trial, emerging as a fully human man of God, or, in this case, a real cowboy, neither American nor Mexican, simply and honorably Southwestern, in the mold of Jones's Pete Perkins character.
Jonathan Rosenbaum review
For Pete, it's a story of vengeance/closure as he seeks solace by carrying out the last wish of his ill-fated friend, specifically by forcing his killer to do the work and eventually ask forgiveness of the much-traveled corpse. Though it wouldn't seemingly be the primarily intended reading of the film, it's also possible to view it as a redemption story for patrolman Norton, who becomes a mensch only after enduring some truly horrific discipline at the hands of Pete, serving as some sort of divine figure for this reading of the film.
The primary reading includes all the most obvious themes of the story, namely the mistreatment of migrant laborers from Mexico, and the related issues that arise for both natives and Mexicans. What we get here that we don't get in Crash, for example, is a more complex, though not necessarily robust, characterization of the hard-working chicano than we're used to. We also see a continuum of attitudes by the white authorities toward foreign Spanish-speakers rather than a bifurcation of extreme caricatures. At this level I think the film works fairly well, but it's probably not great.
Mike Norton and his wife serve as a way for Jones and Guillermo Arriaga, the screenwriter, to discuss the underlying cultural values that may help fuel the clash between white Texans and Mexicans. Norton and his wife, Lou Ann, are callow mallrats from Cincinnati, recent transplants to the west Texas desert, and naively hopeful about their prospects. Their utter cluelessness serves over and over again as an indictment of the artificiality and disconnection from reality of consumer culture.
Lou Ann's relationship with Rachel, waitress at the local diner, reveals to us the shallowness of her point of view throughout her development, from naif to disenchanted (and neglected) spouse to the worn-out and defeated easterner who finally gives up and quits both the town and her lost husband. Her comment that Mike is "beyond redemption" seems both true and, ultimately, false, both shortsighted and immediately perceptive. Within the world she knows, her husband is indeed a sad and worthless deadbeat, but that also exposes the narrowness of her experience.
We get an early hint that Norton's unintentional act of manslaughter has changed him when he refuses to go shopping with Lou Ann after driving into Odessa, even as she reminds him, "You used to love the mall." He seems oddly resigned to his fate throughout his abduction and labor-intensive rite of passage, as if he knows innately that the world he is leaving behind is not one to be mourned or regretted.
Jones expresses his distaste for consumer culture visually and symbolically, as he forces Norton out of his regular clothes and into Melquiades' work shirt and pants. Memorable scenes include Norton slipping around in flip-flops recovering Melquiades' body from the freshly re-dug grave as the Friday night Midland high-school football game glows and rumbles in the background; Melquiades' confusion in the hotel room during a sexual liaison, arranged for him by Pete, with palm trees painted on the walls and porn on the TV, liberated finally by some south-of-the-border dance music from the clock radio; and the at-once obvious and poignant, and hilarious, moment when exhausted ex-bigot Norton, who began the film as a brutal enforcer of the border with the demented enthusiasm of an Abu Ghraib guard, sharing a bottle of whiskey with some friendly Mexican gauchos, and abruptly bursts into tears at a ridiculous soap opera his wife used to watch.
All this is to say nothing of the sheriff, the pickup truck-as-horse or the design of the dusty town filled with mobile homes and trailers and its visual link to the old cowtowns of Ford and Wayne, or even Leone and Eastwood. I've also mentioned very little about the powerful, quasi-religious transformation of Mike Norton as a biblical sort of figure (think Moses, Jonah, or Paul), wandering through the desert and put through severe trial, emerging as a fully human man of God, or, in this case, a real cowboy, neither American nor Mexican, simply and honorably Southwestern, in the mold of Jones's Pete Perkins character.
Jonathan Rosenbaum review
Labels: Film
Posted on Thursday, December 11, 2008
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