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A Mexican cowboy seeking work in South Texas, Melquiades Estrada is discovered by two deputies, who find a coyote gnawing at his corpse. One of them shoots the coyote, happy to have something to do. As they approach the body ("Fuck," moans the shooter), the film cuts to Pete (Tommy Lee Jones), who is vomiting.

It's an appropriately gnarly introduction to Mel and his friend Pete, setting in motion the themes of Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: loss, vengeance and redemption. Written by Guillermo Arriaga, the film's disjointed timeline recalls his previous Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Connections between past and present are both fractured and underlined: Pete remembers meeting Mel for the first time, or flashes back to a conversation about Mel's hometown in Mexico while he contemplates his next move.

IT'S YOUR FUNERAL: Tommy Lee Jones drives border guard Barry Pepper to bury the body of the Mexican man he killed.

Pete becomes determined to return Mel's body to Mexico, where he can be buried in the place he has described so vividly, a place that is breathtakingly beautiful and poetic—and, especially, idealized. In his grief and rage over his friend's murder, Pete reimagines himself as a deliverer of justice, bringing moral order to the chaos of the American West.

This particular West resembles that memorialized in movies by John Ford, John Huston and Sam Peckinpah (the journey plot recalls that of 1974's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia). Punctuated by repeated and sometimes breathtaking shots of expansive deserts, dying trees and brilliant flowers, as well as the dangers posed by rattlesnakes, rough ground and lost souls, Three Burials rejects national mythologies of fate and daring. Instead, it offers unresolved relationships and petty frustrations, stories of men and women bound together by emptiness and unstated hopes for something else.

The plot lays out three burials, each a kind of ritual and none quite adequate. The first is abrupt and barely glimpsed, though marked by a title: An overhead shot shows Mel's not-quite-accidental shooter, border patrolman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), dragging the bloodied corpse to a shallow resting place. The film shows the shooting a couple of times, from different angles. Mel is tending goats and Mike is looking through a porn magazine, their separate routines colliding tragically in an instant, when Mel shoots at a coyote threatening the herd. Careless and angry at the world, dislocated and casually racist, Mike doesn't even know what he's shooting at, only taken by a panic when he hears Mel's gun go off—a distant, potentially threatening ptew! that has him scrambling to get his pants back on and his own rifle in position.

Recently moved into a trailer home with his pretty blond wife Lou Ann (January Jones), former high school jock Mike resents his situation, but has no language for it. In this, he's much like everyone else in the film, including craggy-faced Pete and Lou Ann, who spends her afternoons chain-smoking in the local diner, where she strikes up a friendship with Rachel (Melissa Leo), the waitress who is married to the owner and assuages her own boredom by sleeping alternately with Pete and the sheriff, Frank Belmont (Dwight Yoakam, inspired as always).

It is Frank who oversees the second burial, dumping Mel unceremoniously into a grave dug with a backhoe. Though Pete has specifically asked to be informed of the occasion, Frank doesn't. Worse, he refuses to investigate the death of some "wetback." When Pete hears tell of Mike's involvement (he confesses to another guard), he launches into an Old Testament mission, bursting into the cocky young man's home, slamming him into walls and chairs and tying up his wife (leaving her gagged in an easy chair, TV on and remote nearby). Determined to make Mike respect his victim, Pete then drags him off on a passage to Mexico, where he plans to reunite Mel with the family he's seen in a snapshot. This would be the third burial.

Mike's initial designation as a border guard (and a pointlessly brutal one, at that) grounds Three Burials' layers of storytelling and story-needing. Pete abuses him mightily for his ignorance, punching, kicking and pistol-whipping him whenever Mike even thinks about resisting.

Along with this grisly version of a familiar bonding exercise, the film includes several iconic ironies: the blind man (Levon Helm) who listens to Mexican radio though he doesn't speak the language ("I like the way Spanish sounds, don't you?"); Lou Ann's brief encounter with Mel, instigated by Pete and Rachel; Mike's vile abuse of a Mexican woman who will be the one to nurse his snakebite. Heavy-handed in concept, such moments take on a delicate aspect in their renderings here. Among the movie's many grim figures, Mel's decaying corpse (badly preserved with antifreeze) serves as metaphor and reality, an occasion for respect and the limit of legend.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada Directed by Tommy Lee Jones A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Five