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'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada' isn't your typical Western

The first feature Tommy Lee Jones has directed for big screens (there was a previous TV film) may hold no surprises in its setting — the beautifully craggy lands where drawing distinctions between Texas and Mexico makes no sense — or the types of characters — ranch workers, lawmen, women bored with their husbands — who constitute its cast.

Sony Pictures Classics 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada' 4 out of 5 stars Director: Tommy Lee Jones Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Julio Cedillo, Vanessa Bauche, Dwight Yoakam, Barry Tubb Run time: 121 minutes Release date: Dec. 14, 2005 Rating: R for language, violence and sexuality. See showtimes A man of few words Actor/director Tommy Lee Jones gives uncharacteristic interviews with: • The Palm Beach Post • The Atlanta Journal-Constitution On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

It also isn't surprising that the film is smart (even in brain-dead fare like "Man of the House" and "Volcano," we've never doubted the actor's intelligence) or that its attitude toward viewers conforms so closely to the actor's persona: Just as Jones is famously reluctant to over-emote, the film can't be bothered to give us cues; even when its storytelling hops back and forth in time, Jones gives no visual or aural indication of it, leaving us to piece the chronology together.

But the strangeness of "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" may come as a surprise, and so might the sure-footed way that a fledgling director navigates it. Jones undermines some assumptions his fans might have — most of all, he tweaks his cast-iron screen persona — and does it with a sense of humor that's so sly you sometimes wonder if he's joking or not.

Jones plays Pete Perkins, a ranch hand whose co-worker Melquiades has been killed. Local cops are happy to let the mystery be; Mel was an illegal immigrant, after all, and had no family. But Pete (who has lost the only man he could, in a stretch, call friend) is driven by righteous anger, and goes digging for clues on his own.

The whodunit angle lasts just long enough to make things awkward for reviewers who hate to ruin surprises. That's because the identity of the killer isn't nearly as important as what happens after he's found out — Pete kidnaps him — or how he copes with his predicament. The killer enters the film a soulless cipher and, over a torturous journey in which Pete forces him to honor Mel's last wishes, has some humanity beaten into him. The two set out on horseback to carry Melquiades Estrada's decomposing body back to the wife he left in Mexico.

Revenge has been a hot topic in American movies in recent years, reflecting some obvious cultural preoccupations. But it has rarely played out as ambiguously as it does in "Three Burials," where Jones and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga ("Amores Perros") first indulge our retributive fantasies, then shame us for them, and finally deliver an odd, nearly healing sort of closure.

Along the way, the storytellers ask us to accept some pretty dubious coincidences, and they offer characters doing unexpected things that another film would bend over backward to explain. But overexplaining isn't what Jones is about. And the coincidences (like the late-in-the-game reappearance of a character with her own ax to grind against Pete's captive) serve to underline the allegorical nature of the story. Jones may scoff in interviews at city folk who discuss Myths Of The West, but the characters in his film clearly represent things larger than themselves.

"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" is more Peckinpah than "Lonesome Dove," but one wonders if the actor/filmmaker's assuredness might be enough to sell this strange tale to fans of more conventional Westerns — like the baroque and bloodthirsty fiction of Cormac McCarthy (whose crazy, corpse-obsessed hermit in "Child of God" is an ancestor of Pete Perkins) winning over strait-laced Texana devotees. Stranger things have happened.