Movie Pick

Three Funerals And No Wedding

The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada (R)

originally published March 29, 2006

Had not somebody urged me to go see this movie, I wouldn’t have, so I’m returning the favor. Although it won best actor and best screenplay at Cannes, it’s the kind of movie that usually doesn’t make it to Athens and won’t stay long. If you go, director and lead actor Tommy Lee Jones (Men In Black, etc.) will pull you into the life of a nondescript Texas border town and shove you into the middle of the action even as you struggle to sort out all the characters and understand the plot that binds them.

Once you come out the other side, you can put it all together and realize it’s a fairly simple story of friendship, loyalty, boredom and commitment - with probably a large dose of redemption. But the film, written by Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote 21 Grams and Amores Perros (yeah, I haven’t either) follows a non-linear plot revelation that tells the story more according to how it matters to the main characters than to chronology.

Like life, the story happens even as you’re trying to figure out what’s what and who’s who. If you like your movies all fuzzy and romantic like you like your sex, then you might want to pass this one up, because even the sex is as unblinking as the Texas landscape that surrounds it.

Tommy Lee Jones plays Pete Perkins, a ranch foreman who takes seriously the request of his younger friend and ranch hand Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo) to take his body back to his home in Mexico should anything happen to him. He doesn’t want to be buried north of the Rio Grande “with all these fucking billboards.” Something does happen to Melquiades, thanks to border guard Mike Norton (Barry Pepper in a riveting performance), and for that matter something happens to Mike’s young, blonde wife Lou Ann (January Jones), thanks to Melquiades, who spends most of his time in this film as a corpse, as you might glean from the title. Something doesn’t happen to Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam), in spite of the help of Rachel (Melissa Leo), who will make you keep your eyes open the next time you’re in a small-town Texas diner, and whom others, including Pete, consider their main squeeze. And something happens to your preconceptions (and those of the Georgia legislature and the U.S. Congress) about Mexicans, too, in the course of this film.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a rich, multi-textured character-driven film sprawling from the hard-bitten little Texas town through the vast, sweeping, mountainous desert to its end in that poignantly imagined place where the home of Melquiades Estrada lies.

Pete McCommons

Pete McCommons

Movie Pick

Badass Times Three

Inside Man (R)

originally published March 29, 2006

Spike Lee has always had a unique relationship with New York City, and he uses that city’s topography to full effect in Inside Man. You rarely see the sky in the new bank-robbery film, as buildings crowd the frame, and the claustrophobic sense of immediacy is only heightened as Lee rarely lets the camera leave the scene of the crime.

Inside Man is the story of a heist, and it thankfully eschews all the scenes of intricate planning that many other films in the genre feel the obligation to fetishize. Basically, it’s this: Clive Owen’s character breaks into a bank and takes hostages. Denzel Washington’s character is his detective counterpart. Jodie Foster plays some sort of mysterious power broker right out of the conspiracy theories, and Christopher Plummer is the head of the bank intent on protecting his interests.

The set-up is fairly routine, but the script’s taut pace keeps things moving. It’s an engaging film as you experience it, though don’t spend too much time thinking about it, or you’ll realize that certain plot points never mattered or never even materialized. (So, why was he…? And how exactly did he…? And again, what does she…? Ah, never mind.) There’s nothing so glaring that it’ll pull you out of the film, but you may have a hollow feeling after the lights go up and you’re heading home.

Washington, though, is eminently watchable as he Gary Coopers across the screen, ambling with his self-assured intensity. In fact, Foster and Owen are particularly overconfident as well, and that they’re equally able to project a sense of badass-ery is one of Inside Man’s strengths, only because you know that not everyone’s going to come out a winner. It’s something that other recent heist films lack, particularly those like Ocean’s 11 - if everyone’s so ultra-cool and on top of their game, then where’s the tension? How could they possibly fail? Why get emotionally invested if the outcome is assured? Inside Man does well to avoid that trap, and it leads to several tense scenarios.

But it’s when Lee plays with symmetry and asymmetry - in terms of both visual storytelling and social stratification - that Inside Man becomes its most compelling. There’s no better American director to tackle issues of class, access and power, and Lee is able to do so with a deft efficiency and a surprising levity. His movies are always worth seeing, regardless of their flaws. Whether a positive or a negative, they’re always able to elicit reaction, and that’s significantly more interesting than the slack-jawed blah-by-numbers job delivered by too many recent films.

Unfortunately, Lee still has issues creating nuanced female characters. The two in Inside Man are either the pussy waiting at home, as he presents Washington’s girlfriend, or “a magnificent cunt,” as Plummer calls Foster. A hard-edged caricature to the extreme, she naturally takes it as a compliment. Someone should explain to Lee that things aren’t always black or white (at least when it comes to women).

And hey, wow! A Spike Lee joint with an ending that’s not ham-fisted and colossally unsatisfying!

Chris Hassiotis

Chris Hassiotis