Tommy Lee Jones Is Not Acting
In both life and the roles he’s played, he’s been described as difficult, ornery, curt, and contentious. And while meeting to discuss his latest—and some say greatest—movie, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the Texas film legend more than lives up to his billing.
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On his own, Jones hired the noted Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. The two of them came up with a story in which Jones would play Pete Perkins, a weathered, laconic foreman of a ranch in West Texas who learns that his illegal-immigrant ranch hand, Melquiades Estrada (played by Fort Worth actor Julio César Cedillo), has been shot dead and quickly buried by surly young Border Patrol agent Mike Norton (Barry Pepper). When Perkins later learns that the local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam) has reburied Estrada in a pauper’s grave and is refusing to investigate the killing, dismissing the Mexican cowboy as “nothing but a wetback,” Perkins suddenly, almost impulsively, decides to take justice into his own hands. Perkins kidnaps the Border Patrol agent and forces him at gunpoint to dig up Estrada. Then he straps the dead Estrada to one horse, straps the Border patrol agent to another horse, and heads for Mexico on a harrowing and at times crazed journey to bury Estrada for a third time, in the little town where Estrada had said he had been born. Jones and Arriaga titled the movie, appropriately enough, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
With co-producer Michael Fitzgerald, Jones received financing from EuropaCorp, a French-based film company. Although he had directed only one film before—a television movie based on the Elmer Kelton novel The Good Old Boys, about a Texas cowboy at the turn of the century—Jones was so passionate about this film that EuropaCorp promised him and Fitzgerald complete creative control. It was almost certainly not going to be a blockbuster. One third of the dialogue was in Spanish, and the majority of the plot was revealed in a sometimes baffling, nonsequential fashion. There were no spectacular chase scenes in the script, no deafening shoot-outs, no high-tech special effects. Yet the film was clearly as important to Jones as anything he had ever done in his career. Between 2001 and 2005, while he worked as an actor in big-studio movies—including, ironically enough, one of the worst films ever set in Texas, Man of the House, in which he played a Texas Ranger protecting a group of University of Texas cheerleaders who have witnessed a murder—he quietly developed Three Burials, making sure every detail was just right. “He was the stubborn perfectionist, tweaking the script over and over, changing a comma in one sentence, rewriting the dialogue until the rhythm was just right,” Fitzgerald said. “He scouted all the locations for the film and helped pick the entire cast and crew. Obviously, as opposed to his past work—work that was always in the service of someone else’s idea—this work was especially important to him, for this was a story with which he had a very deep connection. And the results, I think, are quite felicitous.”
Indeed, it is hard to think of any other movie that so realistically captures contemporary West Texas—that landscape of sprawling, historic ranches and run-down trailer parks, of breathtakingly stark mountain ranges and forlorn, heat-baked towns. Jones filmed much of the movie on that far West Texas ranch that he owned at the time. He filmed other scenes at a drab cafe in Van Horn, not far from the ranch. He also filmed at the vaulted Santa Elena Canyon, in Big Bend National Park, in the desert sand dunes in Monahans, and at an oil-field supply yard between Midland and Odessa.
What’s more, he made sure to populate the movie with the kinds of characters that seem to exist only in West Texas: men and women who live on the margins, burdened with small, thwarted hopes. Throughout the movie are gritty ranch hands, nasty-edged lawmen, vacant-eyed laborers, and scared, tormented Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande. There is an adulterous middle-aged waitress at the Van Horn cafe whose pained face says everything about her life. There is a blind man, immersed in despair, who spends his time listening to a Spanish-language radio station. And at one point, for really no reason at all, Jones includes an image of a heavyset lady standing outside her mobile home, surrounded by a chain-link fence. “A lot of people might not see particular beauty in a featureless mobile home and a chain-link fence,” Jones told me. “But I do.”
Without question, the most interesting character in the movie is Jones’s Pete Perkins, a grizzled, stubborn, lonely old cowboy whose belly sticks out over his belt. Perkins works cattle on a ranch owned by a nameless, never-seen man who lives in a Texas city. Every now and then, Perkins drives from his tiny ranch house into Van Horn to drink coffee in the cafe. When he speaks to people there, his sentences are short and the words monosyllabic, and he rarely smiles. Only when he learns of Estrada’s death does his life start to change.
Yet despite Perkins’s quixotic quest to honor Estrada’s wish to be buried in Mexico, he is not an easy man to like. He is appallingly brutal: At one point in the movie he pistol-whips Norton, the Border Patrol agent (“Get back over there where you was at!” he snarls in perfect West Texas vernacular), and he later lassoes Norton and drags him across the Rio Grande, nearly drowning him. At other times, he seems emotionally disturbed. One night, during the journey into Mexico, he props up the dead Estrada in a sitting position by a campfire to keep him warm, and on another night, he combs Estrada’s hair, continuing even as the hair comes out in tufts. And then, unexpectedly, as the movie is drawing to a close, Perkins reveals a deeply hidden vulnerability. In one of the best scenes in the movie, Perkins stands outside a run-down bar in Mexico and calls the waitress—who he’s having an affair with—at the Van Horn cafe, asking her if she will leave her husband for him. When she says no, his disconsolate, lost look is unforgettable.
“Yes, Pete’s a little peculiar,” Jones told me, his voice going soft. “He might look like a simple man, but he’s not. He’s real. He’s full of conflicting emotions. He goes from one emotion to another very quickly. Sometimes those emotions are hard to understand. Sometimes they’re not. And sometimes those emotions cannot be controlled.”
“In other words, he’s a little like you,” I said.
Apparently he did not hear me, or he decided my statement was not worthy of a response. He continued facing forward, staring directly out the windshield, and he did not say a single word.
WE REACHED SAN SABA, and I realized my journey with Jones was coming to an end. In a last-ditch attempt to connect with him, I threw out some random questions. I asked him what he was reading. “James Lee Burke’s new novel and Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream,” he said. I told him I’d heard he was writing a screenplay and I wanted to know what it was about. “Haven’t finished writing it,” he said. I asked him if there was a particular kind of role he was looking to play next. He sighed and said, “A particular kind of role? I’m sorry, my mind doesn’t work that way. I don’t call my agent and say, ‘Find me a role in which I can be a detective and wear a wide-brimmed fedora and two-toned shoes.’”
I could tell he was sick and tired of talking to me. Then, we turned off the highway and headed down a dirt road, finally arriving at the ranch. Jones got on the CB radio and said to a ranch hand, “Fleming Springs One calling Fleming Springs Two. Bubba, do you copy?” The gate, which did not have a sign, opened electronically, and we made a wide turn past two immaculately manicured polo fields. Jones spends a small fortune each year on polo, funding two teams that consist of himself, his wife, Dawn, six professional polo players, and at least fifty horses. The teams spend nearly half the year based in Palm Beach, Florida, where Jones has a horse farm and stables, and the other half of the year at the San Saba ranch. “We are at the top of our game,” he said when I asked him about his love of the sport. “We can beat anybody, anytime, anywhere.”
We continued on, driving past Jones’s two-story limestone ranch house, which is nearly 150 years old. A couple of guest cottages were nearby, nestled next to a creek. Then we headed up a hill so Jones could check out a newly built saddle house for his cow horses. He got out of the Expedition, walked inside the house, studied the floors and walls, and said, “Damn good.”
From our vantage point at the top of the hill, we could see white-tailed deer racing toward some brush. In the distance, cattle called to one another. The setting sun was simply spectacular, the purple light bouncing off the clouds and the rampart of surrounding hills. A light wind blew across our faces. Jones suddenly said, “In the summers, we’ll work cattle, and then at about seven o’clock at night, we’ll start playing polo. We’ll play until about nine, and then when we’re done, we put the meat on the fire and watch the dark come. It’s a good life. Everyone is happy.”
It was the first time that day that he had volunteered something about his life without my having to have first asked a question. I asked him if he ever let visitors come to the ranch on those summer evenings to watch the polo matches. “Oh, no,” he said. “The gates are locked. We keep it shut down. Just friends and family, no outsiders. Just how I like it.”
We looked at each other. It was clearly time for me to go. We got in the Expedition, drove back out of the ranch, and pulled up in front of a little San Saba motel where I would be spending the night. Trying to be funny, I said, as my parting line, “Well, was there any subject I missed that you wanted to talk about?”
Jones didn’t crack a smile. “I think we covered it,” he said. I tried to shake his hand, but he didn’t turn around in his seat. Wes put the Expedition into gear, and off they went into the night.
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