Taking out the Trailer Trash
I watched "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" last night. So should you.
The film begins unimaginatively, ammounting to Jones' poring over the directorial clipboard, sucking his lucky 2B pencil:
Alien-yet-familiar landscape? Check.
Character establishing vignettes? Check.
Weather beaten, careworn faces staring soulfully, knowingly, into the camera? Check.
But just when you're starting to wonder whether the $8.50 you've been saving for this tight-ass Tuesday couldn't have been better spent on methylated spirits and some grainy German porn to sip it to, the movie suddenly hits its stride. From then on, apart from one excruciatingly mawkish corn-husk shucking scene (where you know Jones considered subtitling "Aww shucks. Thems people just like us..."), the unfolding storyline effortlessly holds your attention.
Not so much for the plot, which is a threadbare afterthought wrapped around Jones' and Norton's superb acting, but for the intimacy that the characters achieve in their lethally dependent relationships. The film desperately wants to find sinners, but only so that it can offer them salvation, and then sigh beatifically when they accept. This tennis-match turning of the cheek is nuanced; not nearly so abrupt as the emotional inversions of 'Crash', to which some of the interaction seems blatantly indebted. It is also infinitely more hopeful, so that by the time you leave the cinema no amount of murder, kidnapping, betrayal or erectile dysfunction can stop you from thinking that all is right with the world.
But what's really impressive about this is the economy of language with which it is achieved. Compared to the dialogue driven coruscation of say, a Tarantino or Andrews production, the film is essentially mute. This is at least to a certain extent a conscious structural device, underscoring the inherent limitations of language's ability to reveal ourselves to one another, especially in a polyglot world. The frequent recourse to listening-not-hearing or hearing-not-seeing tropes argues that we are all in such a world, seperated by emotional if not linguistic inarticulateness. But I wonder if there isn't perhaps an experiential side to this? With young directors cutting their teeth on low to no budget films, one of the few elements that can be cost-effectively and endlessly reworked is dialogue. By contrast the efforts of experienced actors slumping into the director's chair seem far more preoccupied with an ineffable human nature, one where hands on shoulders, melancholic stares or variable stubble are the only reliable rosetta stone. Perhaps. You tell me.
The film begins unimaginatively, ammounting to Jones' poring over the directorial clipboard, sucking his lucky 2B pencil:
Alien-yet-familiar landscape? Check.
Character establishing vignettes? Check.
Weather beaten, careworn faces staring soulfully, knowingly, into the camera? Check.
But just when you're starting to wonder whether the $8.50 you've been saving for this tight-ass Tuesday couldn't have been better spent on methylated spirits and some grainy German porn to sip it to, the movie suddenly hits its stride. From then on, apart from one excruciatingly mawkish corn-husk shucking scene (where you know Jones considered subtitling "Aww shucks. Thems people just like us..."), the unfolding storyline effortlessly holds your attention.
Not so much for the plot, which is a threadbare afterthought wrapped around Jones' and Norton's superb acting, but for the intimacy that the characters achieve in their lethally dependent relationships. The film desperately wants to find sinners, but only so that it can offer them salvation, and then sigh beatifically when they accept. This tennis-match turning of the cheek is nuanced; not nearly so abrupt as the emotional inversions of 'Crash', to which some of the interaction seems blatantly indebted. It is also infinitely more hopeful, so that by the time you leave the cinema no amount of murder, kidnapping, betrayal or erectile dysfunction can stop you from thinking that all is right with the world.
But what's really impressive about this is the economy of language with which it is achieved. Compared to the dialogue driven coruscation of say, a Tarantino or Andrews production, the film is essentially mute. This is at least to a certain extent a conscious structural device, underscoring the inherent limitations of language's ability to reveal ourselves to one another, especially in a polyglot world. The frequent recourse to listening-not-hearing or hearing-not-seeing tropes argues that we are all in such a world, seperated by emotional if not linguistic inarticulateness. But I wonder if there isn't perhaps an experiential side to this? With young directors cutting their teeth on low to no budget films, one of the few elements that can be cost-effectively and endlessly reworked is dialogue. By contrast the efforts of experienced actors slumping into the director's chair seem far more preoccupied with an ineffable human nature, one where hands on shoulders, melancholic stares or variable stubble are the only reliable rosetta stone. Perhaps. You tell me.