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The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a highly acclaimed movie that spins trinities in parable and speaks of man's inhumanity to man and of the redemption in forgiveness.
The main trinity evolves with Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones's character) as the spiritual man, Melquiades Estrada as the mental man, and with Mike (Barry Pepper) as the mind-numb border patrolman. They are spirit, mind, and body. Mike is shown as being especially narcissitic, with a masturbating scene and another love-making scene with his beautiful wife which might as well have been masturbation.
Mike mindlessly shoots and kills Melquiades Estrada and buries him in an effort to cover up the crime. The body is discovered and buried for the second time in the town cemetery. The cover-up that occurs mimics a real incident of this nature upon which Guillermo Arriaga wrote his novel (upon which the movie is based). Melquiades Estrada has thus been buried twice.
The plot then is driven by the promise Perkins had made to Melquiades Estrada to see him buried in his own village. Thus the movie becomes a tribute to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which is driven by the same motive--with the same results.
The trinity then evolves. It is present, past, and future; father, son, and holy ghost; for Melquiades Estrada is then the eternal past, shown only in flashback, while Norton and Perkins are the present and future. Perkins, the surrogate father, is teaching Norton, the son, of his ties to the common humanity of things. At one point, he drags Norton through a river, in symbolic ritual of baptism. The closer they get to the third burial, the closer Norton and the ghost of Melquiades Estrada become until they are inseparable.
They never do find Estrada's actual village, but at this point of realization all villages are one and true forgiveness is universal.
Melissa Leo is excellent as a part of the Eternal Feminine trinity in the movie. She followed this with Frozen River and The Fighter, for which she is nominated for an Academy Award. Levon Helm played an excellent supporting part, just amazing. And Dwight Yoakam was surprisingly good.
The movie was well reviewed everywhere, but my favorite review of it was Roger Ebert's, at this link. Very early on, Ebert had pointed out the connection to William Faulkner and the high quality of the movie in general. Famous novelist Stephen King, in Entertainment Weekly, said of the movie, "Tommy Lee Jones channels Cormac McCarthy...and it works."
This week's debut of the Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel Jackson starred play garnered mixed reviews.
The "novel in the form of a play" is part My Dinner with Andre
part the bridge scene in It's a Wonderful Life (60th Anniversary Edition)
.
R. Bull is credited with that cover showing a stylized human face on the universe, which is fitting for this play on the human condition, two suns in the sky as eyes for the two ways of seeing, the old testament and the new, Yahweh and Elohim,
yin and yang, the material and the spiritual.
Of course, the work that Sunset Limited really begs comparison to is Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot. The characters are always going somewhere but never getting anywhere, perpetually hung in the same dilemma.
Lois Gordon, in her marvelous work, Reading Godot, illuminates this dilemma, but it up to the individual to solve this riddle for himself. My other favorite study of this is Paul Foster's Beckett and Zen: A Study of Dilemma in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (Wisdom East-West Book. Grey Series)
. Past, present, future. Body, mind, spirit. Father, son, and holy ghost. Superego, ego, and id. McCarthy's early style was Faulkner, the middle style was Hemingway, and the late style is Beckett.
The news is, link, that actor/author/director James Franco has been given the job of bringing Cormac McCarthy's classic western, BLOOD MERIDIAN, to film. A difficult task, seeing as how there is not one interpretation of the novel, but dozens.
Despite his relative inexperience compared with Terrence Malock, Tommy Lee Jones, and others who were considered, we're hopeful that he will take the care needed to do the job right. On the wiki site, his bio says that he is a reader, always carrying around a copy of Homer or Joyce or some other classic, and that's a very good sign.
Here's hoping that he will retain Cormac McCarthy's friend, Tommy Lee Jones, in some capacity, either as advisor or actor or both. He should also consider hiring, as a consultant, Rick Wallach, the eminent McCarthy scholar and author who was one of the founders of the Cormac McCarthy Society back in 1993. Wallach's subtle take on BLOOD MERIDIAN and its humor would prove invaluable.
I'd also like to see James Franco use John Sepich's vision of the novel--that BLOOD MERIDIAN hinges on the compassion the kid shows in the desert. You can read about it in Sepich's essay in the revised edition of Notes on Blood Meridian (Southwestern Writers Collection)
, which also cites the many historical sources that Cormac McCarthy used in the novel.
The violence in the movie has to be done just right, no easy thing to do in this era when movies seem to be as violent and noisy as video games, as if they turn up the volume at every explosion.
My advice, to James Franco the reader, is to study the way this was accomplished by Sam Peckinpah. One of the great things about THE WILD BUNCH were the close-ups on the actors' faces. The audience could see when Bishop Pike was conflicted in his expression. There was a difference in the expressions of men who were reluctantly shooting, those who were angrily shooting, and those who were gleefully shooting. Such nuances were carefully accomplished and, in that movie, done right.
James Franco already had a daunting movie to be filmed this year: William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING. This too will be difficult to do right, as there are by design a dearth of interpretations, all equally valid.
I think that Oprah had the best of intentions when she selected this novel for her bookclub but the humorless way it was presented made it very awkward and uncomfortable, both for those trying to understand it and those of us who have long loved AS I LAY DYING for what it is.
I've read all, or nearly all, of the critical literature on AS I LAY DYING, and the one book I'd recommend to James Franco is Austin Wright's Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors
. Not only are the many interpretations of the novel in here for comparison, but this book offers a new and brilliant clarity of understanding.
