The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada study guide contains a biography of Tommy Lee Jones, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Pete Perkins, a local ranch foreman, kidnaps a Border Patrolman and forces him to disinter the body. The film received generally positive reviews; it currently holds an 87% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus states: "Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut is both a potent western and a powerful morality tale. Melquiades Estrada was an illegal immigrant from Mexico who had found work in Texas as a cowboy. Perkins has some luck in locating a woman Melquiades indicated was his wife but, when Perkins confronts her, she states that she has never heard of Melquiades Estrada and lives in town with her husband and children. The accident will lead the couple into a moral conflict. Melquiades' body is found and is reburied in a local cemetery by the sheriff's office. The captivity, the tiring journey, and the rotting corpse slowly take a profound psychological toll on Norton. Amen. He decides to head back home and let the border guards take care of things. Nevertheless, the sheriff finds himself involved when Norton’s supervisor invites the sheriff to step outside the café where a waitress he’s having an affair with, Rachel, works. He lives in a mobile home with Lou Ann, who watches soap operas during sex and hangs out at the diner with Rachel because there is absolutely nothing else to do. this section. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Norton is visibly shaken and is given half a bottle of liquor by one of the cowboys. The man and his buddy see coyotes in the distance eating something behind some rocks. "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" tells the kind of story that John Huston or Sam Peckinpah might have wanted to film. The body is found and reburied in Van Horn's town cemetery. A problem soon arises, however: a photo found among the personal effects shows Estrada with a wife and kids. The body is found and reburied in Van Horn's town cemetery. A man is shot and quickly buried in the high desert of west Texas. She reluctantly consents to save the guard’s life, but takes her payment in the form of smashing a coffee pot over Norton’s face. The result is the excellent modern western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which uses the fractured chronology Arriaga employed in … Then a bigger problem: a friend of Pete Perkins discovers shell casings near where Pete’s best friend tended to his goats. Lou Ann Norton (January Jones) is the wife of Mike, the border patrolman. Rated R In 1885 New Mexico, a frontier medicine woman forms an uneasy alliance with her estranged father when her daughter is kidnapped by an Apache brujo. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada Movie Review Summary. Rated R for language, violence and sexuality, Composer Marco Beltrami to Be Honored by Ghent Film Festival (Exclusive). At one point the duo encounter a group of Mexican cowboys watching American soap operas on a television hooked up to their pickup truck. This scene also has a poetic resolution. The The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes written by community members like you. What gathers in this story of lonely men and deep impulses is a kind of grandeur; Tommy Lee Jones plays Pete Perkins not as a hero but as a man who looks at what has happened to his friend and responds according to the opportunities at hand. The sheriff actually manages to spot them and aims his weapon at Pete, but can’t go through with it. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (also known as Three Burials) is a 2005 French-American neo-Western film directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones and written by Guillermo Arriaga. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada Summary, Read the Study Guide for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada…, View Wikipedia Entries for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada…. A jeep driven by one man wearing army clothes stops on the road. Even when Pete shows her a photo of her standing behind Estrada she fails to have any appropriate reaction one would expect from a widow and says only that she doesn’t want any trouble with her husband.