I'm not sure what drew me to this pseudo-western (set in the modern West). Despite its recency and high ratings on multiple sites, I don't think I'd heard anything about it after seeing the trailer. Maybe the title alone got me curious.
"Mel," as his American rancher friend Pete (Tommy Lee Jones) calls him, is a Mexican farmer with no criminal past to our knowledge. Due to a forgivable misunderstanding, border patrolman Mike (Barry Pepper) shoots him dead. What's less forgivable is that when he realizes his mistake, he leaves the body in the desert and doesn't report it. After the authorities give him a slightly more dignified "second" burial, Pete does a little detective work and determines both who killed Mel and why the sheriff (Dwight Yoakam) isn't doing anything about it. Pete takes matters into his own hands and brute-forces Mike to give Mel a better burial -- well across the border, with the sheriff's department in pursuit.
It's the silver-screen directorial debut of Jones, with help from writer Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel). Jones actually translated the screenplay to English himself, still leaving a considerable amount of Spanish dialogue with subtitles (Pete always speaks Spanish to Mexicans). He doesn't do badly at direction or language, but I think his main offense as a director is a confusing overuse of time jumps in the first act. Sure, any time you see Mel alive is in the past, but that's not enough for me. At the same time, we could've used a little more backstory to help us believe in the friendship between Mel and Pete and really care what happens.
I suppose I should have been a little more prepared for this movie. I mean, the corpse is gross enough by the time someone finds it; the third burial is wayyyy overdue. And we have other characters' reactions to assure us it stinks to high heaven.
While there's a lot more travel than violence, it's still R-rated, partly for language but mostly for gratuitous sex. Between January Jones as Mike's wife and Melissa Leo as a married slut, we have a fair amount of screen time for women, but it's neither very dignified nor blatantly relevant to the primary plot. And Pete's treatment of the former while kidnapping Mike does no favors for his own image.
I'm tempted to take the story as a political message against the border patrol. Heck, Arriaga's Babel made them look pretty harsh as well. Granted, even if you approve their job, they make an easy target in this regard. More importantly, we see in a flashback that Mike has a history of being extra hard on illegals, with his own boss admonishing him for it.
I'm also tempted to take it as a revenge fantasy. Obviously it's no Quentin Tarantino killfest, but it still looks like an excuse to have a "hero" behaving worse than we normally accept and apparently getting away with it. I wasn't the only viewer to feel sorry for Mike; after all, we know better than Pete that it wasn't murder. Fortunately, Pete has his little mercies.
Another commonality with Babel: Sometimes we get a hint of an interesting if highly peripheral side arc, but it doesn't pan out. I get the feeling that Arriaga has some ideas that just won't sell as scripts on their own, so he squeezes them into others.
Between acting and minor details, I'd say the film gets pretty immersive...eventually, when the time jumps are out of the way. Then there's the question of whether we want immersion in the given scenarios. In the end, I can only deem TTBoME average for the mix of emotions it evokes. You may want to see it for a somewhat different tale, but keep your expectations in check.
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