Ghosts

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Directed by Tommy Lee Jones

The Ballad of Cable Hogue Directed by Sam Peckinpah

It was inevitable that the ghost of Sam Peckinpah would have hovered over Tommy Lee Jones' theatrical directing debut, but Jones invites the haunting by invoking Bloody Sam's spirit in every frame of Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Jones, a Texan and a hopeless Western aficionado, is obviously entranced by Peckinpah's distinctive brand of Western?revisionism that's filled with powerful romantic, sexist presumptions and bursts of violence (all of which are shot through moments of grubby humor). Three Burials, which also stars Jones as a rancher trying to bury the corpse of a migrant laborer friend who was murdered by a border patrol officer, embraces both the style and substance of Peckinpah; the film is particularly attuned to the rhythms of Peckinpah's highly-functioning alcoholic phase, which, according to biographies, stretched from 1970's The Ballad of Cable Hogue through his last semi-controlled, fully-realized drama, 1974's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. This phase, which also included 1973's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, replaced Peckinpah's Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs coiled fury with a more relaxed, frankly boozy vibe. In a PBS documentary about Peckinpah many years ago, Pat Garrett co-star James Coburn remarked that the movie's circuitous rhythms and deeply melancholy vibe made the film seem intoxicated; the whole movie seemed to be drifting slowly downstream like a raft full of drunken, sun-stroked river rats. Three Burials is not as pickled as Pat Garrett or Alfredo Garcia-which featured a career-best performance by Warren Oates, who in retrospect might have been Jones' father-in-spirit. But it's definitely intoxicated with Peckinpah and all he represented: a man's need to justify himself, even if it means mistaking vengeance for justice; the conflict between social conditioning (religion, commerce, military or police discipline) and man's irrepressible urge to fuck, kill and acquire, and how the former often provides cover for the latter.

All these themes are present, to varying degrees, in Three Burials. Jones' character, a goodhearted, Spanish-speaking rancher named Pete Perkins, tries to avenge the gross mistreatment of his friend Melquiades (Julio Cedillo, who's charming in a too-saintly role) by unearthing his corpse and attempting to take it back home to his Mexican village.

Three Burials taps into that peculiar comic-obsessive vein that Peckinpah owned throughout the Nixon era. Watching Pete ride through parched Cinema Scope vistas while keeping tabs on the late Melquiades and his killer, Mike Norton (who Pete abducted in the name of justice), you can't help flashing back through the master's gallery of scabby Southeastern Quixotes like Pike Bishop and the "Wild Bunch" gang, Cable Hogue, Pat Garrett and Billy, Steve Judd and Gil Westrum from Ride the High Country, and Bennie from Alfredo Garcia.

But nostalgic recognition will only get you so far. You've got to wonder-when critics praise Jones' homage to Peckinpah, are they actually praising Three Burials? Or are they essentially saying, "This film reminded me that I miss Peckinpah and wish he were still around making movies, and in a pinch, it'll do."

After seeing Three Burials, I was tempted to fall into the first camp. Then I bought the new boxed set "Sam Peckinpah's Legendary Westerns Collection" (Warner Home Video, $59.98), and now I'm in the second, so squarely that I can safely say that whether or not you embrace Three Burials may depend on whether you've seen a real Peckinpah movie lately. After revisiting the originals, I find Three Burials to be little more than a pretty good tribute.

The movie's sluggish rhythms, eccentric ensemble cast, cleanly composed widescreen images (by the great Chris Menges), nasty/comical depictions of violence and Cubist-fractured structure (courtesy of screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who penned 21 Grams and Amores Perros) attempt a direct link to the Peckinpah's work of the early 1970s. But Jones only connects while failing to dig deep. As depressive, dusty and frequently revolting as Three Burials is, there's a softness and safety about it. These aspects are rooted in both Jones' characteristic folksy hard-ass movie star performance-the same one he often gives, but somewhat gentler and more nuanced-and in the film's midpoint shift from Robert Altman-by-way-of-Point Blank ensemble narrative (covering many characters in Pete's community) to a nearly exclusive focus on Pete's obsessive quest to bury the body of his beloved, despoiled pal.

While the Peckinpah connection becomes most obvious in the film's pokey-fanatical second half, which finds an increasingly drunk and crazed Pete dragging corpse and captive ever-closer to Melquiades' home turf, Three Burials is actually more intriguing and promising (though less streamlined) in the first half, when Jones tries to expand and fracture Peckinpah's vision of community as an unstable nexus of nobility and cynicism, commitment and betrayal, savagery and kindness.

Without giving away anything, everybody in this town seems to be cheating someone else-be it a lover, a spouse, an employer, a government or a faith-and then, when they don't get caught, feeling a bit less guilty about doing it again. ("When you check in the cheating hotel," sings a song on a car radio, "you'll be back.") Arriaga's jumbled-up storytelling makes even less structural sense here than it did in previous films; there are a lot of "Whose flashback is it anyway?" moments, a lot of juxtapositions that confuse rather than reveal, and that works at disrupting Jones and Menges' clean, thoughtful, near-rhyming compositions. (Check out the early image of two hunters inspecting the carcass of a coyote they just shot, then watch how Jones refracts it in a subsequent low-angled master shot of Mike discovering Melquiades' body.) But for all its missteps, the first half is at least trying to build on Peckinpah rather than just don his sunglasses and bandanna and try to walk the walk. And the longer Three Burials goes on, the more it collapses into the type of male sentimentality Peckinpah was accused of indulging.

If you want to put the lie to that last assumption, pop in The Ballad of Cable Hogue, one of Peckinpah's best and least-known Westerns, and the only film he made that could genuinely be described as a love story. Jason Robards plays the title character, who is robbed in the desert and left to wander in daze, only to discover water in a place that was presumed to be dry. With help from preacher-come-opportunist-and-ladies-man Joshua Duncan Sloan (David Warner of Straw Dogs), and a $100 loan from a banker in a nearby town, Hogue turns the watering hole in to a stagecoach stop, and systematically transforms himself from sand-caked desert eccentric to a semi-successful entrepreneur with all the headaches that entails. But the film's heart is the relationship between Hogue and frontier prostitute Hildy (Stella Stevens), who goes from being a simple working girl to a entrepreneur's girlfriend, a sometime hostess and a self-revised woman who aspires to be "...the ladiest damn lady you've ever seen." (God love Cable Hogue: he calls her Miss Hildy.)

Peckinpah, operating in Chaucerian comedy mode for the first and last time, shows how people assume particular identities-how they mix idealism with base impulses so that one seems to cleanse the other. Conflating horn-dog ecstasy with the religious kind, Rev. Sloane sighs, "Did it ever occur to you, Cable, how wise and bountiful God was to put breasts on a woman?" Scene for scene, this is Peckinpah's sweetest, warmest film, and in many ways his goofiest. (There's even silent-film style overcranking!)

The filmmaker's inarguably piggish tendencies aren't rationalized here, but they are rather frank before they are made to seem hapless. Seeing Hildy for the first time, in the main street of her town, Hogue talks to her but stares at her breasts; the camera stares with him, and then he looks away from her, abashed, then waits a moment, then looks again; after he walks away Peckinpah cuts in a several-frame flash of that cleavage, as if the image has literally seared itself into Hogue's imagination.Holding a five-dollar bill with an Indian head on it, Hogue contemplates using it to buy time with Hildy; he looks down at the bill, and the Indian's face comes to life and seems to wink at him.

There's nothing in Three Burials as daringly kooky or fresh as that, nor any line of dialogue as moving as Hogue's reassurance to Hildy that he doesn't care that she used to be a prostitute. "Hell no," he says. "It never bothered me. I enjoyed it. Well, what the hell are you? Human being. You do the best you can."