point of no return
by Douglas Messerli
Guillermo Arriaga (screenplay), Tommy Lee Jones
(director) The Three Burials
of Melquiades Estrada / 2005
Despite its receiving the prestigious Cannes awards
for best actor (Tommy Lee Jones) and best screenplay (Guillermo Arriaga), Jones’
directorial feature, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is one of
those films that seems destined to become forgotten over time. I might have
never seen it were it not that my companion, Howard, one day brought home a
copy of the DVD of the film which he’d seen in the theater. When I found that
DVD still unwrapped in 2015, I wondered why Howard bought this film, since even
he had not bothered to watch it in all these years. One afternoon, I sat down
to discover its secrets.
Like its
rather cumbersome title, Jones’ film may put off some potential viewers simply
by the fact that the name of it’s character is difficult for many non-speakers
of Spanish to say and that its genre is not readily apparent.
If
anything, it might remind the astute viewer, as it did several critics, of Bring
Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, the movie filmed in Mexico in 1974 by Sam
Peckinpah, the director who many commentators felt could have made this film
or, at least, might have wanted Tommy Lee Jones to star in his strange Western.
As Spanish language commentator Fernando Santoyo Tello wrote on Letterboxd
(translation mine), “In fact, it's very similar in several ways to one of
Peckinpah's masterpieces, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. In both,
a character finds redemption through a dead body that accompanies him on a
journey marked by revenge.”
Several
other critics noted the similarities between Jones’ work and Peckinpah’s as
well as its relationships to the fictions of Cormac McCarthy, John Sayles’ film
Lone Star, and, in particular, the 1989 TV miniseries adaptation of
Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. In the Stopsmiling internet site,
Nathan Kosub, siting that TV series, reminds us that “Everyone, it seems,
missed the first time a cowboy played by Tommy Lee Jones hauled the decaying
body of his closest friend a long distance. Which is odd, since that ghost is
the soul of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.”
So much
of Three Burials is in Spanish, moreover, that it might even be
described to being close to a foreign film directed by an American. At many
times the work, particularly in its second half seems closer to a Richard
Linklater-like satire of Texas life such as his Bernie, even though
Jones’ work is far more macabre than even burying a mean old lady in a freezer
which the character Bernie does.
Some
critics reminded us that Jones’ BA dissertation at Harvard was on Flannery
O’Connor, whose writing has a great deal in common with Three Burials. In
on the online publication Pundicity, Thomas Hibbs argues, “In its
peculiar manner of combining humor, violence, and hopeful gravity, the film
comes closest to the sensibility of Flannery O'Connor. Along the way, it has us
laughing as we ask: Who's crazy? What constitutes folly? And can enduring
violence and abject humiliation be a path back to God?”
And,
finally, it’s impossible to watch the second half of this film, wherein the
central character Peter Perkins (Jones) carries the body of his dead friend
Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo) on a long trip back to his hometown in
Mexico without being reminded of the long voyage that Anse Bundren and his
children take from their isolated rural Mississippi home to bring their wife
and mother to her birthplace in Jefferson in William Faulkner’s As I Lay
Dying, yet another Southern gothic and grotesque masterwork. Michael R.
Neno, writing in Film Review Central, suggests that just “as [Mexican
director] Alejandro Iñárritu and [Three Burials screenwriter] Guillermo
Arriaga’s film Amores Perros (2000)…was influenced by the time and
perspective-fragmenting methods of William Faulkner, The Three Burials
uses as its template Faulkner’s 1930 novel, As I Lay Dying. As Addie
Bundren’s dead body was trundled across Mississippi by her poor family,
fulfilling her request to be buried where she was born, so Melquiades Estrada’s
body is similarly carried, though treated by various people in such bizarre and
uncaring ways the film sometimes veers toward wicked comedy.”
Certainly,
the way that the voyage in Faulkner’s fiction is most often interpreted as
ending in a kind of resurrection would be highly appropriate for Jones’ work,
which is also seen by most critics as permitting what commentator Josh Lewis
describes on Letterboxd was a “spiritual, restorative grace.”
In my 2008
essay on As I Lay Dying, “The Dreadful Hollow,” I argued that Faulkner’s
fiction, in reality, does not allow for a restoration or resurrection for Anse
and his family since they are actually vampires, and Faulkner’s tale,
admittedly influenced by Dracula (both the US and Mexican versions being
shot throughout 1930, and very much in the news), is an American vampire tale.
When Howard I first shared some of my ideas about this essay, mentioning my
comment about the two men having “bonded,” he joked, “Yes, bonded by
necrophilia,” without his having ever read my essay on Faulkner’s work. If
nothing, else, this interpretation would very very much support the feeling
among numerous critics that the second half of the film is simply macabre.
Certainly it would help to explain the symbolic importance of the three
burials, the necessity of bringing the dead back to the living again and again.
Yet, for
all the influences that I have just named, which reveal the difficulties of
trying to locate Three Burials in one or another genre, this masterful
work of cinema is simply unique.
Although
I’ve hinted at the plot, perhaps it would useful to briefly recount some of the
narrative so that I might explain some of my later conclusions.
The
hard-working, straight-thinking ranch manager, Pete Perkins, unlike many of his
border-town Texas neighbors, seems to have a close kinship with Mexican
culture, speaking the language fluently and being unafraid to hire on the
illegal alien Estrada, with whom he immediately bonds, sharing a kind of
bromance with him as they ride horses (Estrada offering up his own special
horse as a gift to Perkins), rustle cattle, and sexually engage with a couple
of local women, Rachel (Melisa Leo), the wife of the local diner owner, Bob
(Richard Andrew Jones), and the new woman in town, Lou Ann Norton (January
Jones), who has recently moved from Cincinnati with her husband Mike Norton
(Barry Petter) who works as a border guard.
These
women aren’t really prostitutes, just women who are bored with the stultifying
emptiness of Vernon, Texas where the most exciting thing is the nearby shopping
mall. Rachel clearly enjoys Perkins’ gentle company, yet she is hardly
particular about the men in her life, claiming to truly love her elderly
husband while also regularly having sex with the town Sheriff
Belmont (Dwight Yoakam).
Similarly,
the rookie-border patrolman, Norton is having sexual problems. He needs the
magazine Hustler to keep his sex life alive. Clearly his wife has become
disinterested in his lame sexual attempts. As we observe her slicing up the
food for their dinner while watching a soap opera, Norton rises, goes over to her,
pulls down her denim skirt and sticks his cock into her for all of about 2
minutes. She hardly registers the fact that he is attempting to engage in sex.
What these sexually incompetent men have in common is anger expressed in hate and violence. One of the earliest scenes in the film reveals just how Norton is having a hard time of separating his duties from excessive violence, as he runs down two escaping Mexican illegal immigrants, beating both the man and the woman, breaking the nose of the latter. The old timer head of the border patrol looks at those few who escape with some tolerance—“Somebody got to pick the strawberries,” he admits—while clearly Norton feels those who get away indicate his failure. His commander sums it up, “You were way overboard there, boy.”
We soon
discover just how “overboard” Norton truly is when older border patrolmen,
observing a coyote eating something, discover that it’s gnawing on a recently
shallowly buried body, that of Perkins’ Mexican friend Estrada, who Pete has
previously promised to take back to the small Mexican village of Jiménez if
Melquiades died of this side of the border.
After
being shown the bullets which probably killed Melquiades, however, he perceives
that they are the same size and brand as used by the border patrol. Rachel,
overhearing the border patrol Commander confiding that one of their men has
unintentionally killed the Mexican, reports what she heard to Perkins, who
having his fears confirmed, takes direct action of his own.
Waiting until it gets dark, Peter
kidnaps Norton, after tying up his wife so that she cannot immediately report
the event to the police. Even here, despite the almost total madness of his
actions, the gentle cowboy, places a blanket around her body so she won’t get
cold and turns on the TV set so that she will remain entertained until someone
arrives to free her.
The
remainder of this complex film becomes, as I have suggested above, a kind of
pilgrimage of purgation, wherein Perkins ritualistically forces the seemingly
unredeemable Norton to take a voyage not only with him but into the
world which his friend formerly inhabited. After demanding that the hand-cuffed
border patrolman dig up Melquiades from his second grave, he takes the body and
Norton back to Melquiades’ squalid home, insisting he sit at his place at the
table, drink from his cup, and, soon after, put on the dead man’s own clothing,
before setting out with Norton and the body to find his friend’s small Mexican
hometown.
If
sometimes these lessons in empathy seem a little too pat and even mawkish—as
when the two men come across some young Mexican cowboys huddle around a broken
television set watching the same soap opera which Norton’s wife had been
watching while he attempted to fuck her—others are spot on.
Like a
scene out of Frankenstein (with their own Frankenstein-like monster in
tow), the two come across an old blind American (Levon Helm) who sits near his
shack listening to Mexican music, the words to which he cannot comprehend. Like
the blind man of Mary Shelley’s tale, he offers them everything he has, which
includes coffee and an evidently unpleasant tasting gruel. And since the corpse
they are carrying is quickly rotting, the stench almost unbearable, he provides
them with anti-freeze which Perkins gruesomely pumps through the dead man’s
mouth into his veins.
When they
ready to leave, the blind man—having previously told them that his son visits
once a month to bring him food and necessities—admits that his son has not
visited now for more than a year, and, since he believes his son has died of
cancer, begs them to kill him. He would gladly kill himself, he explains, but
as a religious man he cannot disappoint his god. Perkins, so we perceive, is
also a man of belief, if not a man of god, and refuses the task.
In one of
the film’s numerous intentional coincidences, the woman curer turns out to be
the very same woman whose nose Norton has broken earlier in the film, and
recognizing her attacker, she refuses to offer her help. Perkins’ gentle
Spanish pleas for his survival changes her mind, and she draws out the venom
with herbs, saving the young man’s life. The next morning, however, she seeks
her revenge, breaking his nose with a coffee pot.
By the
time the two corpse-bearers finally reach a larger town near to where
Melquiades has mapped out as his hometown, Norton has suffered such traumatic
experiences the he begins to seem like a changed man, without even knowing that
back in Texas his wife has left him to return to their hometown Cincinnati. In
the small village they find the woman Melquiades has reported to be his wife in
his photograph, but she denies even having known Perkins’ friend, only accidentally
revealing that she may be lying when she pleads with him not to pursue the
matter for fear of destroying what is clearly her new marriage.
The
entire town seems to be suffering from amnesia when they mention Jiménez,
Norton reacting with near madness after his hallucinatory voyage. Perkins
insists, however, they move forward, as they finally discover a building of
fallen stones overlooking the very mountains and river Melquiades has
described. Together, the two men—in a scene that seems to be more symbolic than
real—patch up the walls, rethatch its roof, and lay the stinking corpse into
its grave below.
Perkins
demands a final obsequious confession from Norton, who, after a few bullets are
sent flying near his face, breaks down in utter sorrow for his murderous act,
resulting in the older cowboy offering him freedom and a horse to take the
sinner back to his empty space in “civilization.” Ironically, it is Norton who
asks the question, “Are you going to be okay?” when we perceive that Perkins
will surely survive the trip back to sanity, a place where Norton may never be
able to return.
While
watching this profoundly intelligent work, I kept feeling that it should be
required viewing for those numerous intolerant US citizens—Donald Trump in
particular—who wish to keep out all the immigrants who define us as a nation. I
not only wish that some of these unfeeling men and women might be led, as was
Norton, on just such a journey. I wondered, moreover, how anyone might even
imagine building a wall across the vast panoramas of mountains, deserts, and
ragged terrain Jones and his cinematographers, Chris Menges and Hector Oretega,
revealed in this film, with the intent to protect us from such strawberry
pickers, sheep herders, and gentle cowboys as we encounter in this film.
Los Angeles, December 8, 2015 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2015).
*
I wrote the above essay on December 8, 2015. Today,
I uncovered this review of nearly a decade earlier with curiosity and utter
frustration. For I still clearly recalled the film and was now reminded that I
had purposely left a huge hole in my discussion of this picture, partly out of
fear, but mostly out of sheer laziness, not wanting to once again take my
readers’ hands and lead them through a territory which many of them didn’t want
to be led, explaining why it was important that they consider my point of view,
while knowing that a great number, if not most of them, would simply be unable
to comprehend or might even in resistance refuse to accept.
This time,
after watching the film once again, and reading all the reviews I could muster
up from the time the film was first released (some 55 reviews, long and short),
I realized that I had excused excuses myself for offering up a deeper
discussion in the manner that almost all of these reviewers unknowingly or
purposeful had chosen to do. In some ways, I had been even more negligent in
refusing to even failing to mention a comparison that almost half the reviewers
had brought up in passing, the then-recent film about cowboys who also shared a
deep “bond,” Brokeback Mountain, which was released the very same year.
I specifically refused the comparison because I knew where it would have to
take me. But the vast majority of the others just tossed it into their essays
because it was at that moment being discussed everywhere. The reviewer from the
Miami Herald presented the majority logic:
“Its social consciousness aside, The Three
Burials of Melquiades Estrada is really a simple love story between men set
in the American West, although unlike Brokeback Mountain, this love is
purely platonic—nothing more than the bond of brotherhood between two dear
friends, a classic Western theme.”
Erik
Samdahl, writing for the online Filmjabber, was for coyer than the Miami
Herald critic in his allusion:
“Gay cowboy movies dominated 2005, yet it was Brokeback
Mountain that got all the glory. While Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are
up for Academy Awards, Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper and Julio Cedillo are
nowhere to be found—and that's a three-way relationship!
Okay, so The
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada has nothing to do with homosexuality,
nor is it even remotely similar to Brokeback Mountain in any way, but it
caught your attention, didn't it? How about this: Three Burials is a
better movie than the Oscar-nominated film.”
Yet I did
basically agree with Samdahl’s final evaluation, yet another reason why I
hadn’t brought up the subject of Ang Lee’s movie. I’ll come back to than matter
later.
And at
least these two critics dared to really point to the issue at hand, to begin to
question what precisely was the relationship between the two cowboys, Perkins
and Estrada. Most of the reviewers and commentators described the two as
“friends” (Roger Ebert, for example, who begin with describing Estrada simply
as an employee of Perkins, but later in the essay admits their friendly
relationship), while others such as Alex Bean for the International
Cinephile Society suggests that “Pete is bereaved beyond reason by the
senseless loss of his compadre [italics mine]….” Dean Kish, writing in Showbizmonkeys.com also
sees them as “best friends,” and explains Pete Perkins as falling “to pieces
after…[Estrada] is suddenly murdered.” For Philip Concannon in his review in Phil
on Film, Estrada, a “eponymous illegal immigrant,” is Pete’s “close friend.”
Manhohla Dargis in The New York Times seemingly qualifies even the
simple friendship by describing Estrada as Pete’s “Mexican Friend,” while
arguing they live in a borderline world that separates “poor from rich, men
from women, [and] friend from stranger.” I would argue, that since Pete doesn’t
accept these separations, why do it for him?
Rob
Fraser, writing in Empire Magazine, puts the two just a little bit
closer by describing them as “best pals.” David Carter in David Carter Books
takes Fraser’s relationship just a little further, by describing the “Mexican
cowboy” and Pete’s “drinking and whoring pal,” pushing them just a little
closer to the relationship between the cowboys Jake (Ethan Hawke) and Silva
(Pedro Pascal) in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2023 film, Strange Way of Life,
where even years later, the bisexual cowboys found themselves still in love.
Melquiades may be just a “friend” in David Lee Simmons’ brief essay in Gambit,
but he noticeably moves closer to also being something else in Simmons’
extension of what a friend might be when he describes it as a “friendship
between two not-quite-as Brokeback Mountain-gay cowboys.”
And in
Tim Brayton’s piece in Alternate Ending, the friendship is clearly
elevated to another level when he locates their friendship within the large
picture:
“The movie kicks into gear at this point, and all of
the praise you've been reading about how the film taps into the mythos of the
Western starts to make sense. Despite what conservatives have decried about the
blasphemous Brokeback Mountain, the Western is a uniquely homoerotic
genre, packed with depictions of men bonding in the wild, forming deeply
codependent relationships, and viewing women as a great destructive force
(domesticity is always the enemy of manly friendship in Westerns). Three
Burials pushes that into a sort of ultimate by giving Pete a homosocial
fixation on a dead body. It's creepy, but more than a little touching. If the
Western is ultimately about the relationship between men, Three Burials
is a perfect Western: it is about a man going basically to the ends of the
earth to fulfill his duty to his friend.”
Notably, Brayton
not only locates their relationship within the homosocial world of cowboy
friendships, but also recognizes that Pete’s performance of what most of his
fellow critics described as simply the cow herder’s “promise” to return
Melquiades to his homeland is actually “creepy.” Alex Bean, who I mention
above, contextualizes the journey as being “conceived under the strain of
madness.” And for critic Aaron Silverman, Pete’s voyage represents “a rather
odd and quite morbid tale of loyalty, friendship, and frontier justice” that
eventually transforms into “a captor-hostage situation that borders on bloody
revenge.” To Chris Panzner, writing in Stylus, the accidental murder of
Estrada “wakens the demonio oculto in vigilante Gringo rancher Pete
Perkins.”
In short,
although none of these critics can quite explain Pete Perkins’ relationship to
Estrada or his motives for the long mad voyage he makes with the murderer
Norton in tow to Melquiades’ previous home, most of them inherently recognize
that something is going on in this movie that is more than simply a friend or
even, as described it, a man who has deeply bonded with another man, living up
to a promise.
Christopher Borrelli openly wonders in The Toledo Blade “What’s
with that far-off gaze of hurt that drove long, weathered crevices into Tommy
Lee Jones' great face? Where do the resignation and those bottomless barrels of
sympathy in his eyes come from? Why does he always look like he's about to cry?
And how did it all harden into a landscape of wide reservoirs of bitterness and
wisdom?”
You just
have to look into the tearing eyes of Pete when he hears of Mel’s death to
realize that his feeling for Estrada is something more than a good buddy for
whom justice will not prevail. The deputy sheriff who visits Pete, reminding
him that that he’s been holed up for more than two days in a sort of catatonic
trance, begs him to find a way back to life, full-well knowing that the
relationship between the cowboys was far more than simply that of being good
friends.
There is
no evidence of, and given the world in which they were raised and in which they
must survive, it is highly unlikely that they have manifested that love in male
on male sex. But the film gives us plenty of clues that they may have thought about
it. Even the demented Sheriff Belmont, as I mention in the first part of this
essay, has contemplated queer love.
And Pete
himself is hardly of the marrying kind, as the nice, well-bred people used to
describe queer folk. Critic Jonathan Rosenblum puts it quite bluntly:
“Jones leaves social and family skills almost
entirely out: Perkins seems capable of being sexually comfortable with Rachel
only because they hardly ever talk — his cluelessness when he calls her from
Mexico leads to an unforeseeable turnaround — and all the characters, even
Estrada’s widow, seem to see sexual betrayal as an everyday fact of existence.
But Jones also makes much of the rapport in the same-sex friendships, including
one between Lou Ann and Rachel.”
And when the
sympatico feeling between the two men get a bit too intense, Pete immediately
grabs the masturbatory hand of the younger man and takes him into town for some
manly sexual relief and fun with the two bored women. It’s clear, that despite
his claim that back home he was married, Estrada is not at all sure he wants to
hook up with a woman. Even Pete teases him about it, and when they move into
their respective motel rooms for their afternoon entertainment, Melquiades
keeps looking back at Pete, clearly uncomfortable about leaving his side. When
Lou Ann gets him alone in the room, even she recognizes his ineptitude
regarding the opposite sex, attempting to turn on the TV to relax him (failing
because it shows only porno movies) and finally providing him some radio music.
The only way she can get him into his arms is to ask him to dance.
These
men use women, not so very differently from how Lou Ann’s husband uses her
merely as a momentary relief; but at least they’re not pretending to have a
real relationship with these women, but are simply out for a bit of momentary
fun, which is, after all, what Rachel and Lou Ann are seeking as well.
You don’t
offer up your most prized procession, in this case a horse, to another man just
as a friendly gesture. Estrada’s insistence that his friend take his beloved
horse is as good as a gold ring for celebrating their love for one another.
I know
this is lonely territory to claim that these two “straight” seeming men are
deeply in love, but we’ve seen this kind of love between two basically
heterosexual men in many a war film from William Wellman’s great 1927
masterpiece Wings on, and witnessed the same kind of love in numerous
coded westerns from the 1920s to the present, including, of course, the most
obvious of these Brokeback Mountain.
Fortunately, I’m not the only one who recognizes this reality. Writing
in Film Freedonia, Richard Heath takes a long look at both films,
comparing the characters and their behaviors in Brokeback Mountain and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and
placing them firmly into the tradition of western movies like Red River
and, to a lesser degree, in the context other films that deromanticized the
western mythic scene such as George Stevens’ Giant, Arthur Miller’s The
Misfits, David Miller and Dalton Trumbo’s Lonely Are the Brave, and
Martin Ritt’s Hud, the later like Brokeback Mountain and the
earlier film in which Tommy Lee Jones suffered a similar voyage with a corpse, Lonesome
Dove, all based in Larry McMurtry fictions.
Not all
of these can be described as concerned with male-centered love. In fact, I even
doubted whether Brokeback Mountain could be described as truly a gay
film. As I wrote in my review from this same year (printed above), it should
come as no surprise that from time to time lonely cowboys and sheepherders,
without recompense to women, have sex with other men—just like sailors,
soldiers, and jailed prisoners. And in the case of Brokeback Mountain Jack
Twist and Ennis Del Mar truly enjoyed it, so much so that they couldn’t wait to
do it again and again throughout the film. But as Tina Turner surely would
loudly proclaim, “What’s love got to do with it?”
And that,
in fact, was what made me so ultimately dissatisfied with that film. There was
no there there. Twist, in particular, would surely have liked there to be
something more between them, but Del Mar just wasn’t interested in pursing
anything more than his lust, and even Jack was perfectly happy to
compartmentalize his gay sexuality by, as the critic Heath puts it, sleeping
with Mexican male hookers and keeping on “the lookout for another partner who
will adapt to his part-time vision of love.” And Meanwhile, “Ennis lives in
justified fear of frontier morality, which eventually claims Jack.”
As Heath
quite brilliantly summarizes the links between these two films:
“Both films are remarkably rich tapestries that
extend well beyond the specifics of their plot to take in an almost epic, yet
expressively minimalist vision of whole cultures in a state of flux, and the
people within them in a state of crisis. Although Pete and Melquiades are not
homosexual—though it’s easy to imagine Pete as Ennis, 20 years after the end of
Brokeback—their bond, as well as Jack and Ennis’, demand almost mystical
commitment to notions beyond the visible, or even factual. For Ennis, it is to
accept permanent emotional exile: our last vision of him, a reverse of the end
of The Searchers, is gazing out on an eternal plain whilst living with
dreams and memories in his shabby trailer. For Pete, it is to reject his
country, his livelihood, even his sanity, to give Melquiades a true resting
place, and extract from a man with no terms of reference beyond bad daytime
soaps and suburban plasticity a true contrition.”
But the
irony he points out about Brokeback Mountain is what makes me less
interested in that film about two sex-driven cowboys than the two love-driven
cowpokes of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Heath writes:
“It’s ironic, perhaps, that Brokeback Mountain,
concentrating as it does on a gay romance, offers its most biting and memorable
moments in observing the men’s heterosexual lives—the kitchen confrontation
where Alma, having left Ennis, lets slip her simmering loathing of him and Jack
sets Ennis off like Krakatoa, is one of the most convincing moments of marital
spite ever filmed. Similarly, when Ennis spurns vibrant barmaid Cassie (Linda
Cardellini) and apologises, “Sorry, I can’t have been too much fun,” she
responds in anguish, “Dammit, Ennis, girls don’t fall in love with fun,” I
suspect a lot more men than the bisexual cowboys of this world might recognise
themselves….
The Three
Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a messier, less compressed tale, and
overdoes its early portrayal of Mike Norton’s baseness, but then Three
Burials has an edge of wryly surreal comedy and deliberate morality tale at
its heart, not the lightly poetic realism and heart-dulling tragedy of Brokeback
Mountain.”
I strongly
agree, moreover, with Heath’s assessment of Ang Lee as having “the stuff of a
great filmmaker,” who “has yet to make a genuinely great film.” Heath observes,
“His work on Brokeback is as meticulous and measured as always, almost
too much so. It is often so over-posed in its desolate beauty as to look like
the world’s first animated Andrew Wyeth painting, and his feeling for the West
is never quite convincingly raw. Since the warm inclusiveness of his early
films, a frost has gilded Lee’s heart, and he finally seems to mistake
emotional stinginess for detachment.”
But in
the end, at least for me, Three Burials, a love story between two men
who don’t have sex with one another is a far more profound gay film than Brokeback
Mountain, a story about two men in love with male-on-male sex but
who cannot fully imagine truly getting to know and living with one another. In
fact, neither Jack or Ennis seem to know how to really love anyone of either
sex. Jones’ film was precisely what I felt was missing in the so-called gay hit
of the year, which even today queers and straights can’t stop talking about as
a break-through work of art. Somehow, I feel, we have lost our focus.
But then
love is something special, that happens rarely between men and women, women and
women, man and man, or between even those who don’t quite know where they stand
in connection to gender. People get married every day, but love…Ennis and Jack
never truly experienced love except as a kind of nostalgic collage of memories,
the way, strangely, Three Burials screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga
attempts to conjure it up in his cut-up narrative of the first part of his
film. Cowboys being such verbally inexpressive beings, however, require that we
have to take it on faith and the long camera pans of Jones’ chiseled face and
tearful eyes—that is until Pete proves it by playing a modern day Virgil who
ruthlessly guides his mindless Dante through the Inferno until he finally puts
his boy* to rest—maybe even transforming the world in the process into a kind
of patched-up version of heaven? Pete surely ain’t no Beatrice; but one has to
wonder after seeing his version of beatific Mexicans whether heaven really
matters.
*Scholars basically concur that Virgil was
homosexual. He writes about a male lover named Alexis his Eclogues. Aelius
Donatus, the Roman grammarian and author of Life of Virgil argues that
the great poet loved only boys, and had long relationships with two boys, both
previously slaves, one in particular named Cebetes, who also became a poet, and
the other named Alexander.
Los Angeles, November 6, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November
2025).
