Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The

Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The

I am not a scholar of Western films. I’ve only seen the absolute classics, (mostly the Eastwoods) and truth be told am more inclined to think Young Guns than The Searchers in regard to the genre. Perhaps were I more versed in the works of Peckinpah and Ford then all of this film would be imbued with a greater sense of meaning, but without the context of the entire genre of Western cinema Three Burials, on its own merits, is a sometimes tedious and bloated film with some glimpses of cinematic beauty and some great character work, but which frustratingly never seems to graduate to anything but drawn-out poetry of rugged landscapes and blunt themes of friendship, racism, justice and revenge. Yet the directorial debut of Tommy Lee Jones has been met with massive acclaim and overwhelmingly glowing reviews across the board, with most of them referring to Western films of old. It’s not a bad film, in fact it certainly threatens to get quite good in spots, but overall I think it’s quite overrated…but I am not a scholar of Western films.

For a while I thought the film was boring only because I wasn’t sure I fully understood what was going on – it’s easy to lose interest if something makes me feel stupid – but even after catching on I had to fight sleep and eventually finish this over a few days.

What I still don’t quite understand is why the first half had to be such a slow mess of confusing jumps back and forward in time while the second half cruises through relatively without such intrusions.

For me the film only really begins half way through when they embark on the journey, when stoic-yet-crazy Jake (Tommy Lee Jones ) kidnaps his friend’s killer and takes him with him to return the body to his native Mexico. Everything before that seems like a lot of unnecessary back-story peppered with a few extraneous and stupid characters, like the obviously bigoted sheriff and the town slut. It also really dawdles on innocuous scenes with these characters that seem to have no pay-off or real relevance. So the sheriff is impotent. Who the fuck cares? – especially since he disappears half-way through the movie never to be seen from again.

Now I have no idea if some parts of this were meant to be funny, because I certainly didn’t laugh at all, but there are shades of Weekend at Bernies shenanigans as the corpse they are dragging through the desert causes all sorts of wacky problems for them. So there you go, this film is for lovers of pure Western cinema…and of Weekend at Bernies apparently. Enjoy.