HOWZAT

The movie's patch lies between Odessa and El Paso, land already staked out by Cormac McCarthy (most recently in No Country for Old Men). His prior claim is acknowledged, both by the director, Tommy Lee Jones, and the screen-writer, Guillermo Arriaga. Jones will be paying his dues when he plays Sheriff Bell in the Coen Brothers' forthcoming adaptation of No Country for Old Men, but Arriaga's tribute is more immediate. The plot of McCarthy's novel is set in motion when a young hunter fires at an antelope, and stumbles on a drug deal gone bad, discovering among the bodies the uncollected loot. In Three Burials, the starting gun is fired by an older hunter who downs a coyote, only to find that it has been snacking on the body of a Mexican, Melquiades Estrada -ranch-hand, smallholder, and now corpse. The deceased has a single friend, but a good one, his foreman Pete Perkins, played by the director as a monosyllablist whose more expressive face looks as if it has spent a lifetime in the Texan sun.

In the film's first section, time is disjointed, enabling Estrada to spring back to life (in the form of Julio Cesar Cedillo) long enough to check into the cheating motel with his killer's bored wife (January Jones), and to extract a promise from good old Pete to bury him in his native village. We also get to witness his end. It turns out it was all a mistake. Melquiades was taking pot shots at a coyote worrying his goats. A border patroller, taking an al fresco dip into the new edition of Hustler, assumed that the shots were meant for him, returned fire and hit the mark. The patroller is an over-zealous outsider called Mike Norton (a crew-cut Barry Pepper), with no idea of the live-and-let- live attitude that prevails in this bend of the Rio Grande. Finding out the name of the guilty party, Pete accosts the uninterested Sheriff (Dwight Yoakam).

Although they share a lover (the delightful Melissa Leo), he gets no satisfaction, and no hope of any. Moreover, he is informed that his late friend has already been interred in foreign soil. So Pete decides to take the law into his own hands; kidnaps Norton, forces him to exhume Estrada, and commences the long flight to Mexico. At which point (in the movie at least), time straightens out.

As the ill-assorted trio head for a shadowy canyon, the pursuing Sheriff actually has Pete in his sights, but chooses not to squeeze the trigger. This is the moment when the movie decisively parts company with Cormac McCarthy, and not only McCarthy. One ungenerous American critic felt that what the movie lacked was Sam Peckinpah. Even a dead Peckinpah, he wrote, would have done a better job than Tommy Lee Jones. This is to traduce both Jones and his splendid movie. The point of Three Burials is that the state's population, given the choice, would prefer not to kill one another. Norton, who breaks the rule, learns his lesson in Mexico. But it's not, admittedly, the kind of instruction you'd get from either McCarthy or Peckinpah. For both of them, Mexico is a glamorous but fatal place. For the creators of Three Burials, on the other hand, the country is wholly redemptive, in which case the border with Texas is self-defeating. Better than the two-state solution would be a transcendent place without a Border Patrol, and populated by a new breed, perhaps called Texicans.

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