The Tex-Mex Western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Tommy Lee Jones, is like a guided tour so ineptly planned by travel agents that the bus keeps breaking down, wrong roads are taken, and the destination is never reached, and yet...and yet the views out the window are gorgeous and the company within the bus is oddball enough to be interesting. So the tour was a failure, but you had a memorable time anyway.

The first third of this two-hour movie is the prologue to an odyssey that occupies the remainder of the story. Melquiades (Julio Cesar Cedrillo), a Mexican cowboy who has illegally crossed the border for work, finds a job with an unprejudiced, gruffly good-natured rancher, Pete Perkins (Jones). At the same time, we meet young Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), a transplant from Ohio who has found a job with the Texas border patrol. As friendship grows between Estrada and Perkins, we observe the vapid relationship between Norton and his wife (January Jones), the former working out his insecurity and boredom by beating up illegal immigrants, and the latter sustaining herself by sleeping with Estrada. Completely unknowing of his wife’s adultery, the patrolman accidentally kills Estrada when the Mexican, shooting at a thieving fox, draws the panicked Norton’s return fire. Norton’s superior, fearing bad publicity, does a cover-up. But Perkins, knowing all too well about the adultery, believes the killing to be murder. Having once promised his friend to bury him in his home town, Perkins steals the body and forces Norton at gunpoint to do most of the grunt work of transportation and interment, honoring the dead and punishing the supposed murderer at one go. Both men, pursued by police and suffering the torments of desert heat and treacherous terrain, go through hell, the difference being that Pete knows why he’s suffering but Mike hasn’t a clue. Nevertheless, we are meant to think that Norton, purged by pain and receiving some relief at the hands of Mexicans along the way, is rendered a somewhat better man by the end of the trek.

Since the dramatic purpose of the first forty minutes is to set up the moral meaning of the subsequent journey, two things must be accomplished: the friendship between Pete and Melquiades must be as believably loving as possible so that we can later accept Pete’s compulsion to see justice done; and Mike, shallow and bigoted though he is, must be shown as being capable of redemption.

For me the prologue failed on both counts. The friendship is demonstrated through clichés (the pals try out horses and look at family photos), but where are the interesting conversations (however laconic), the pranks, the delight in each other’s skills, eccentricities, even the mutual irritations, that compose a friendship? Such a depiction would consume screen time but Jones could have made up for this by sparing us his apparently boundless contempt for the Anglo culture on this side of the border: many shots of fat women in bikinis, slatternly waitresses in crummy diners, etc. Which brings us to:

Mike Norton and his wife are portrayed not merely as shallow but as virtual androids. Perhaps the most repellant feature of the movie is the way sex is employed to condemn the Nortons. For scriptwriter Arriaga and director Jones, as with D. H. Lawrence, good prolonged intercourse means good character, while brief uninteresting sex means bad character. Mike takes his wife from behind in the kitchen as she’s watching TV and achieves a very tiny orgasm in twenty seconds while she never takes her eyes from the screen. Ergo, these are evil people who deserved to be punished. Since we have already seen Mike’s cruelty to illegal immigrants, why do we need any sexual demonstration of his bad character? If it’s a matter of giving his wife a motive for adultery, then why isn’t the wife shown as being capable of passion instead of being the robot we see? I thought American filmmakers had gotten over clichés of bad sex equals bad character, but apparently not.

With the Perkins-Estrada friendship as uninteresting as it is, and the character of Norton reduced to a posterboy for American macho insensitivity, theoretically the trek into Mexico and redemption should have been dramatically otiose. In fact, the trek is riveting. Why?

First, there is a fascinating, all-pervading irony in the fact that neither Pete nor Mike fully understands the situation he is in. Pete thinks he’s punishing a murderer but he’s not; he is torturing a screw-up (who also happens to be a racist, but Pete never intends to punish racism). The rancher also believes he is bringing the body of his friend to his pueblo and family, but a plot twist near the conclusion forces Pete both to rethink the mission and to regard his late friend in a new light. As for Mike Norton, he never learns that the man he accidentally killed had slept with Mrs. Norton. Mike has committed the act of a jealous husband without ever being jealous. Neither does Norton realize (except vaguely toward the end) that Pete is no maniac but a man on a sacred errand. So these two endure their hideous trek not only under the eye of a burning sun but under the sardonic gaze of grimly humorous, information-withholding gods.

Second, the superlative cinematography of Chris Menges renders the Tex-Mex borderland both lethal and gorgeous, exactly the sort of place where grim solar gods would choose to dwell. The very look of the movie certifies the irony and cruelty of the story.

Third, the performances of the two leads improve once their characters hit the trail, or at least they seem to improve in the new context of physical excruciation. In the prologue, Jones seems so intent on being a grizzled veteran of the sagebrush that he comes across as just plain inexpressive. Yet, embarked on his mission, his blend of watchfulness and hardness proves formidable. And Pepper, as Norton, abandons his android façade (did he land the role because of his resemblance to Timothy McVeigh?) to make the audience wince at every bruise, rope burn, rattlesnake bite, tumble, gashing, and fever that his character endures. Pepper proves to be a magnificently physical actor, but I look forward to seeing him in a role that doesn’t require him to be such a whipping boy.

That reminds me of yet another of this movie’s flaws, this one moral as much as aesthetic. The Three Burials, like Mississippi Burning, is an example of liberal fascism. The rationale for both films goes something like this. If your villain is a racist, then you can show him being beaten, cut, stabbed, dragged by a horse, and scalded by hot coffee-repeatedly, at length, in detail, and in close-up. So the audience can have it both ways. It can have its sadism sated but-double whammy!-can also feel virtuous because a bigot is getting his just desserts. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada has its powerful moments, but does a real work of art both brutalize and flatter its audience?