When we first meet Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo), he is little more than a corpse, an illegal immigrant shot dead and left for the coyotes to tear apart — an undignified "burial" if ever there was one. The cops don't care. Stories like this don't make the nightly news. Like so many fellow Mexicans working off the books in Texas, Melquiades was an invisible man. However, through the eyes of Mel's closest friend and fellow ranch hand Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones), the audience comes to recognize that Melquiades was a decent guy, someone who got through to this prickly loner and earned his respect.

If the movie's only insight were that illegal immigrants aren't given equal treatment in the U.S., then it wouldn't have been nearly such an achievement, but Three Burials is beautiful, authentic and brutally observant of human nature. With real Tex-Mex backdrops instead of the usual Monument Valley vistas and characters too complex to withstand simple white-hat/black-hat reductionism, Three Burials is a visionary portrait of the New West. This is the terrain of Eastwood and Peckinpah, saddled with the concerns of 21st-century life.

Over the first hour, Three Burials unfolds in the trademark fractured style of screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga's other work (namely, Amores Perros and 21 Grams) as the mystery of Melquiades' death crystallizes through a succession of carefully observed moments in the lives of his ensemble. For Arriaga, simple pleasures and mundane moments say more about the characters than quirky details, but actions speak the loudest.

Butting heads with the local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam), Pete refuses to stand by while Mel's killer goes free. He tracks down the overzealous Border Patrolman (Barry Pepper) who shot his friend, trusses him up and drags the guy to Mel's Mexico hometown for a proper burial. So begins the mesmerizing second half, in which an absurd trio of men — a crazed cowboy, his captive, and the decomposing body between them — struggle against the real dangers of treacherous cliffs, snakebites and so on. If that's not love, then I don't know what is (by comparison, Brokeback Mountain's Ennis Del Mar hardly puts up a fight to honor Jack Twist's final wishes).

In many ways, Three Burials actually seems to be intended for a Mexican audience. It's openly critical of its white characters, features generous stretches of Spanish-language dialogue and permits the kind of poetic justice that real life seldom allows. At first, Pepper seems destined to be little more than the movie's punching bag, the weasely white guy meant to atone for all the injustice Americans have ever shown their Mexican neighbors, but Jones' sure-handed directorial debut runs far deeper than a simple revenge story.

What Jones and Arriaga have accomplished is the artful elevation of an exploitation movie premise to the level of a social consciousness picture. It's easy to watch a movie like Kill Bill and pretend that the comic-book emotions of a pregnant assassin getting even for her wedding-day massacre in any way justify the bloodbath that follows, but Three Burials suggests just how resonant a vengeance story can be when afforded realism and respect.

[as featured on Premiere.com]