Corn does not know from culture

Mystifingly overpraised at the beginning of the year by critics who should know better, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is written and directed with the grace and skill of Alfonso Bedoya's holy-frijoles sombrero wearin' wetback from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Guillermo Arriaga, whose screenplays for Amores Perros and 21 Grams proved that needlessly convoluted plots can be as one-dimensional as any B-movie, wrote this variation on Sam Peckinpah's near-great Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia; Tommy Lee Jones makes his directorial debut and plays the main character, a rancher travelin' to Mexico with the title character's body and the Border Patrol killer (Barry Pepper) who killed him. We know the Border Patrol guy is slimy cuz he fucks his wife doggie-style while cooking broccoli and watching a soap opera (should I tell you that its dialogue "ironically" comments on the action we're seeing?) and punches Mexican women in the face before haulin' their brown asses to jail. Jones' direction evinces none of the wit with which he's delighted us after 30 years of acting in nonsense or worse. We don't know what draws Estrada and Jones' rancher; we assume they're intimate because Jones -- his cinematographer bathing the scene in honeyed light -- shows him pictures of his kids before they fuck a couple of whores in flophouse bedrooms (say this about Arriaga: he's mastered the rhythms of third-rate Richard Ford, with a soupcon of Cormac McCarthy's penetrating view of women and Raymond Carver's flair for sexual blight). This is the kind of film in which the young woman whom Pepper punched saves his life after he's bitten by a rattlesnake. Meanwhile Jones and her family sit in a circle, peelin' husks off corn. Would that The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada have learned: it leaves the corn intact.