Melquiades Estrada

"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones, is the best movie of the decade.

Jones and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga walked away from last year's Cannes Festival with the best actor and best screenplay Palmes D'Or for "Melquiades," but the grand prize went to Jim Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers" which I haven't seen. I think Jones probably missed the trifecta by inches.

A story of the harsh life, an accidental death, and one man's redemption along the U.S.'s southern border, "Melquiades" is like a skilfully-rendered minimalist drawing in which characters are fleshed out completely and revealingly with just a few bold strokes of dialogue. Jones has said that one of his influences in making this film was Kabuki, and he certainly was inspired by Kurosawa's 1950 masterpiece "Rashomon," in which a single crime is viewed through the eyes of several different participants.

Pete Perkins (Jones) hires then befriends Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo), an illegal drifter who describes himself accurately as "just a cowboy." Guileless, simple and decent, Melquiades only speaks Spanish, but Pete is fluently bilingual, and as the two grow closer the Mexican asks the gringo to promise to take him home for burial if he should die north of border. He doesn't want to be laid to rest among the billboards, and gives the old foreman detailed instructions on how to find his home, Jimenez, smaller than even a fly-speck on the map of Coahuilla state.

Of course, Estrada does die not long after, shot in an accidental misunderstanding by Mike Norton, a cocky, immature, emotionally repressed Border Patrolman played by Barry Pepper. Pepper has been working Hollywood and playing mostly smaller parts for about eight years, but he's maximized his main chance here by uncorking what must be the performance of a lifetime. His intensity is incredible throughout, and at times he becomes so physically involved in his part he's hard to watch.

When Pete realizes that the cynical and corrupted local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam) is not going to follow up on Estrada's death, even though he knows who the killer is ("He was a wetback," says Sheriff Baxter), he realizes he has to make good his promise to Estrada and at the same time appoint himself as a one-man vigiliance commission. He decides to take Norton into custody.

Norton's wife, a sad little bottle blond (January Jones) bails out of their loveless marriage, departing with an over-the-shoulder postscript that he's "beyond redemption," one of the movie's main themes expressed, as always, with spectacular economy. Neither is there any preaching or moralizing about the other philosophical threads Jones and Arriaga weave here -- racism, cultural chauvinism, corruption, the loss of simplicity as a virtue, alienation, and the universal need to find a moral purpose, something beyond the self.

Filmed mostly on Jones's Texas ranch and in the Mexican Mojave Desert, this was the long-time star's directorial debut. If his next effort is half this good, it'll be a masterpiece.