Three funerals and no weddings, Texas-style.
"I want to ask you to shoot me," says an ancient blind gringo, staring sightlessly up at Tommy Lee Jones' character, Pete, on horseback. "My son ain't coming back…he told me he's got the cancer. So I need you to shoot me." Pete's not horrified, or anything but firmly polite: "No, sir, I guess not," wheeling his horse to go. "You're good people!" protests the old man. "It's the right thing to do!"
"No sir," repeats Jones flatly. "We can't do that."
***image2***It's a representative moment in a film that should have been called Los tres entierros del Melquiades Estrada, but writer Guillermo Arriaga and director (also Tommy Lee Jones) likely realized a Spanish title would have made the movie even less box office than it already has. And that's a shame, because Melquiades is a bluntly lovely film, a neo-Western at times redolent of John Sayles or the best of Clint Eastwood, at times quoting classic John Ford. The scene mentioned above, for example, has all the dramatic simplicity of a scene from The Searchers, or for that matter Greek tragedy, but it's undercut with simultaneous humor and horror, something more like Peckinpah or Leone.
Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo), whom we meet entirely in flashbacks, is a Coahuila vaquero who works alongside Pete on a nameless Big Bend spread as unadorned as their dialogue. We see the two grinning and shooting the shit while working cattle, discussing a Polaroid of Mel's family back in Mexico (whom he hasn't seen in five years); Mel gives Pete a good cutting horse, and they pick up girls together, but that's about the extent of their relationship. When a nervous Border ***image1***Patrol cop (Barry Pepper, described by a scornful Mexican woman as having a "face like a rat") accidentally kills Melquiades, no one much cares what becomes of either victim or crime, least of all the local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam), who's more concerned with his impotency issues. But Pete, strangely, is not going to let it rest (a doggedness that's strange only if you've never seen Lonesome Dove or Unforgiven); he kidnaps the Border cop, forces him to disinter Mel's remains and then literally drags his friend and his enemy, both of whom prove troublesome in different ways, across la frontera to return Mel to his hometown and family-to unexpected effect.
Shot through with gallows humor ("Well, Pete, the ants are eating your friend"), the deadpan beauty of the Davis Mountains, some great ridin' and ropin' from Tommy Lee Jones and a slyly hilarious and spot-on Brown Power agenda from Arriaga, Melquiades Estrada can hold its head up in the company of any border Western, and challenge most of their conventions to (cowboy) boot.
