THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA

Tommy Lee Jones stars and directs in this 2005 movie written by Guillermo Arriaga. Set straddle of the border, this dark tale bleeds back and forth from English to Spanish, and from Texas to Mexico. It is easy enough to forget the subtitles. The lives and laws seem to become more tangled, and the values more blurred the closer to the mostly invisible border we look. The border patrol wages a war in boxing gloves, sorting lives and livelihoods according to rules that keep the tension constant. There, a few miles means feast or famine and the whole economy revolves around a bilingual culture trapped on a knife edge.

This is the best tease of a trailer I found, though any of them really told more than I would have liked. This was an uncomfortable movie to watch, with no clear hero. Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones) wants to do right by his friend Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo) by returning his body to his home town of Jiménez in Mexico as he promised. He enlists the unwilling help of Border Patrol Agent Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) to bring this about.