Tommy Lee Jones‘ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada joins Jim Jarmusch‘s Dead Man as one of my few highly-rated westerns. Like Dead Man, its tone meanders from the darkly comic to the melodramatic, and is at times almost unwatchably gruesome. Which does nothing to explain why I liked it, I know.
Special mention to Barry Pepper for taking what must be one of the most thankless roles in movie history: his character is a onanistic, racist brute; he is beaten, dragged by a horse, forced at gunpoint to disinter a corpse, bitten by a rattlesnake, and not the least of which, spends a good part of the movie with his pants down (come to think of it, so does Dwight Yoakam).
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