Movies: Tommy Lee Jones: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

He’s been a Murderer (Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song) and a relentless lawman (Marshall Sam Gerard in The Fugitive). He married Loretta Lynn (Coal Miner’s Daughter), saved the world from aliens (Men in Black). But the coolest thing Tommy Lee Jones does is … nothing. Nothing, anyway, that Stanislavski could detect. (He never took an acting class. Didn’t matter. Within weeks of graduating from Harvard, he landed a role in a Broadway play.) Jones just puts that rugged, West Texas face on the screen and observes the world with a rattlesnake’s poise. He does watching a whole lot better than most actors do doing.

In The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, he plays Pete Perkins, a ranch foreman whose Mexican friend Melquiades is killed by a hotheaded border-patrol guard (Barry Pepper). As an act of respect, Pete vows to return Mel’s body home; as a moral lesson, he resolves to take the killer with him. At riflepoint.

The film grew from Jones’ friendship with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams). For the Texan and the Mexican, a film about the border patrol struck sparks. “I want to make movies about my country from my point of view,” Jones says, “and Arriaga feels that way about his country. You can’t spend a lot of time in the Rio Grande Valley without realizing that those countries are the same.” The two men’s collaboration worked out handsomely: they won the actor and screenplay prizes at Cannes.

Some people who have worked with Jones, 59, call him prickly. A few leave off the ly. In an interview, he doesn’t grade questions on the curve. Is Three Burials his homage to the Texas landscape? “Homage is not the kind of language that would often be heard in those parts.” What about the film’s political meaning? “To explain what it means is self-defeating. I could have written a political essay. I made a movie.”

But why direct it? To be in control. “That’s a good motivation right there, to satisfy one’s lust for creative control,” he says. And he adds jokingly, “As the director, I also had a part that might appeal to a very expensive actor so much that he might work for almost nothing”—and in the bargain, give an eloquently terse reading of a man’s man, driven by urges that are too deep to be expressed in tears or shouts but are visible on Jones’ face—if you watch him as closely as he watches the world.

This cowboy-curmudgeon acknowledges he’s pleased by the praise for a film he’s proud of. “All my life I’ve had the privilege to make my living with my imagination,” Jones says, “and the most important thing has been to see my creative life grow. I was educated to do that and have lived accordingly.”

Thus spake the sage of the sagebrush.