BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA so fully informs THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA that a "required prerequisite" notice should have been posted on theater doors. This is not to say that THREE BURIALS steals from GARCIA - not at all; but it shares GARCIA's sense of place, its unblinking observation of the human condition, and (with variations) its most important prop. It's the kind of movie Peckinpah might have made if Peckinpah still believed in redemption.
Tommy Lee Jones, who directs from a script by Guilllermo Arriaga, plays a foreman on a South Texas ranch. He hires Julio Cedillo (Estrada) and comes first to respect him, then befriend him. When Barry Pepper's high-strung INS agent mistakenly shoots the young cowboy and the incident is swept under the rug, Jones takes action in the only way that makes sense to him. What follows is a Western by people who "get" Westerns. The cowboys here don't pose silently for aesthetic effect, a la BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. They keep their mouths shut because you don't flap your yap in the desert. The landscape is integral to the tale, but 3B isn't about gawking at the horizon. This movie gets personal in the way only film can - it puts you right into the hearts of its characters - not by having them tell you how they feel, but by making you feel the same way.
GARCIA shares this film's versimilitude, and it covers much of the same ground, but there's a crucial difference: where GARCIA is about a man trying to believe in himself, 3B is about one who never thinks to stop believing, perhaps with tragic consequences. Nevertheless, the latter and the former exist in very much the same world. I'll leave it for you to decide which ending you prefer.
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