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Sunday, 29 January 2006 17:10

After Amores Perros and 21 Grams, it seems Arriaga is trying to branch out and try new things, all the while keeping focus on the traits that made him famous.

Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of Amores Perros and 21 Grams, has a reputation for staging films that are labored in structure, have a strong focus on coincidence, and are obsessed with death. Perhaps this reputation should go to the screenwriter on both of those films, Guillermo Arriaga, instead, because now he’s written another screenplay, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which was directed by Tommy Lee Jones (in his directorial debut), and it is hung up on the exact same things that preoccupied both Amores Perros and 21 Grams.

The Three Burials’ plot is pretty much as its title implies; it even goes so far as to be chapterized based on the numbered burials. Melquiades (to save you potential embarrassment at the ticket window, it is pronounced more or less like mell-key-odd-us), a Mexican working in west Texas, gets killed accidentally and is hastily buried on the spot. Soon after, he is dug up and re-buried in the town cemetery of Van Horn. Finally, an old friend of Melquiades’, Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones), kidnaps a border patrolman named Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), digs up Melquiades again, ties his body to a mule, and treks across the border to bury him in his environs.

After Amores Perros and 21 Grams, it seems Arriaga is trying to branch out and try new things, all the while keeping focus on the traits that made him famous. Three Burials plays like a modern Western much in the way that Unforgiven did. Jones does a fine job directing (he has a special affinity for action scenes) as well as in the lead role, but the real standout here is January Jones (no relation) as Lou Ann Norton, Mike’s bored wife. January is best known for being Ashton Kutcher’s pre-Demi girlfriend and for starring in American Wedding, so even though she has a relatively small role here, it is a pretty major step up in her career.

Melquiades won Tommy Lee Jones the best actor prize at Cannes in May last year, where the film had its world premiere. It was well received by the international press, but the majority of us ignored it in our main Cannes coverage in favor of Caché or Broken Flowers or A History of Violence, which is fitting. I’m sure that there are some who really connect with Arriaga’s hang-ups, and those people will love this film as much as his previous ones. But to those of us who are indifferent to said hang-ups, this will just be a pretty good movie instead of a great one.

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