The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
With Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cesar Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam, January Jones, and Melissa Leo
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Both Haneke’s and Jones’s films are political. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a western, protests the abusive treatment of Mexican immigrants in west Texas, and Cache, an anxiety-ridden crime thriller, protests the abusive treatment of Algerians in France. But Jones appears to trust narrative as a way to enlightenment, and Haneke doesn’t. And Jones’s direction offers more traditional virtues–his handling of landscapes and ‘Scope is especially impressive, thanks in part to cinematographer Chris Menges–though his list of some of his visual influences is fascinatingly eclectic: “the Kabuki Theatre, the art of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, and the films of Akira Kurosawa, Sam Peckinpah, and Jean-Luc Godard.”
The local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam) promptly buries Estrada without bothering to tell Perkins. After it becomes clear that the sheriff has no intention of investigating the murder, Perkins discovers from a truck- stop waitress named Rachel (Melissa Leo)–a married woman both he and the sheriff are sleeping with–that Norton was responsible. Perkins kidnaps Norton at gunpoint, forces him to dig up Estrada’s corpse, and drags both on a mock-epic journey back to Estrada’s remote homestead, where Estrada hadn’t been for at least five years.
