Nobody's Visible Legend

Is it too much to infer that the blind man Tommy Lee Jones and his captive come across before crossing into Mexico, in the 2005 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is emblematic of a Tiresias-like prophet, with all the turbulence of Grecian tragedy? Jones is not much for southern comfort in his later films; Estrada is no exception, and its opening structure has a satisfying sense of ridicule about man’s capacity for destruction with the 19^th century technology of projectile weapons. Shooting wild dogs like coyotes, whether for legitimate purposes or simple sport, has unintended consequences, unraveling puzzles for quixotic figures like Penkins to piece together in his stark landscapes, one in which challenging questions about identity and marginalization are posed, since Estrada himself has very little identity, other than a dream of paradise, and his bond with his buddy, whose subsequent tunnel vision might be driven by guilt, just as Norton’s reactionary bile is driven by fear, and whether or not as the antagonist, this border agent truly sees the humanity of the “chicano” by the close of the film, I’d argue this is open ended, despite guilt shredding his psyche to pieces. Unlike the dowager, Jones is a morally decent conservative, one who posits a true form of liberality. It is admirable, and partly why we might stand against the border wall with Mexico.

Who ever made this meme is as whimsical & inspirational as the old Dr. himself. pic.twitter.com/xWi2c0Z0tv

— Deplorable Eva (@EvaSofii) September 30, 2017

But this 13 year old vehicle is an unforgiving parable. No figure like Clint Eastwood’s trainer stands ready to take the consequences upon himself to alleviate the suffering of a sterile, ailing life. The old man apparently forgives Penkins, since he lies to the posse of agents on the trail of our rather dubious hero. Penkins achieves resolution, but what he took to get there has a gut wincing cost. Although we can assume that a dummy model was used for the dun pack horse which bucks itself over the escarpment, that was some significantly brutal ecological footage, nearly equivalent to the courage of Melissa Leo’s branded, mildly rancid nakedness. Yet Texan mendacity is still entrancing.

Gravity Tends to Pool

I live on a big blue ball--Waylon Jennings, whaler on the belt

Just how Lawrence Schiller managed to draw such an illicit expression from Tommy Lee in that parking lot, during the filming of Mailer's obsession with Gary Gilmore, is nothing short of miraculous. We've all seen movies about psychopathy in one form or another, and Jones has been around a very long time, but that turn on his face as he is walking into the gas station, resolved upon his own damnation, is as terrifying as Henry Lee Lucas, in his own words, is inadvertently ironic.

In 1979, Mailer turned Gilmore into a cause celebre, that much was impressed upon as an anecdote logged onto youthful synapses, but the teleplay never made it into consciousness. There is no liberal argument for that level of malevolence in the human animal; it is, in fact, a mystery to me how an actor we've been so familiar with in his various hunting modes could, for a few precious moments, depict evil with such transcendent energy that the recoil was visceral. Wolf's team hacked the outer framework to have an ethical debate about human potential which perhaps was arbitrarily hollow. Screen writers cannot hit it out of the park all the time. Whether by design, or not, Schiller and Jones simply turn liberalism on its head with this more canonical adaptation of Mailer's moral wrestling contest. The damnation writ large on Tommy Lee's face is beyond any form of redemption humanity's metaphysical struggle can bring to bear on it. This was a made for television movie circa 1982. It puts any number of composite formula films to shame, in small, telling sequences, in its attempt to inhabit cyclical American tragedies that make our violent propensities an international brand, lapping up our ruthlessness.

As difficult and gruesome as it was to absorb Michael Rooker as Henry, a few grades down on the level of depravity even for my turbulent instances of domestic discord, Jones, as Gilmore gone bad, might have scared me straight if there was any real optimism left to save.

Cell 2455

The difficulty represented by films like The Hunted (2003), however unfair to its real life tracker Tom Brown, is we've seen the American lone wolf engage in countless expiations of this sort. Tommy Lee Jones channels Clint Eastwood, hounded by, hounding rogues. None of these films ever go far enough in implicating the American circumvention of its Enlightenment ideal. They indemnify themselves with the deceleration of the contest. The real secret service agents who lost JFK commit suicide. Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich simply replay Homer's Iliad. Yet the inferences to draw from Friedkin's direction are a little more subtle. What isn't indicted in the script is implied in the combat, the sheer brutality of Benicio del Toro, the wilderness in which Jones isolates himself, speak volumes about intervention over our current retrenchment of engagement-- in this sense, the synthesis of our visual entertainments replaying the same themes over and over is unfortunate. I do not need to be rich enough for cable to know that our serials beat to the same rhythms. Halle Berry is reclaiming ABC's failures to commit to near term space opera fictions with Ron Livingston. Alien Terra-forming of the human animal is representative only of our doubts about our own unraveling.  

Tommy Lee Jones and persistent mediocrity of made for television

An elation had evidently penetrated to his vitals, and caused him to dilate as if he had been filled with gas. He snapped his fingers in the air, and whistled fragments of triumphal music.-- Stephen Crane, "The Monster"

Eyes of Laura Mars is too diaphanous in its denouement to amount to anything, but the link it makes between glamour, violence, our belief that there is something to ESP despite the charlatan horde, women scarred by it, men fractured by pain into remorseful killers trying to police themselves, makes it the signature syndication vehicle of adolescent imprint, laudably modish. The seventies lost itself into that kind of couture, that sartorial sensibility that Orhan Pamuk might wish upon Turkish police, the shag was real, so were bell bottoms, and Ms. Dunaway's boots, Carole King hair. It might have amounted to something if Jones, the rising Texan boy, had killed Faye, gotten away with it, and went on his merry way, though the script would have needed tightening. In the course of this project, I thought I had found the equally mopey British movie about a fraudulent EMS driver who steals a doctor's medical board exams and then destroys his one, two, friends who learn the truth. It too was a mediocre soppy deal, but Britons at least have the courage not to lie to themselves about brutal lack of ethics, and I believed I had tracked this chilling little number down and placed it in keywords, but if I did I can't find it, frighteningly plausible as it is. With Mars as a noted exception, Jones generally stays within his range, and developed his own sartorial sense in his sugar daddy years, opting out of his libertarian liberalism of The Park is Mine (why the fuck was this movie made at all?). Idiotic as this vet drama is, it was produced the same decade  Terry Gilliam decided to dazzle his clique with Brazil. "Park" is like a weak stream of mostly water-clear urine that nevertheless anticipates 9/11 with its clueless governing class, who try to deliberately mislead the public about an angry PTSD warrior with an agenda. Race issues are very lightly trod, with Yaphet Kotto as the pragmatic operations officer, who kills a guerrilla fighter his superiors had approved to take Jones out, while meanwhile, in the background, your typical hustler is hawking orange Tees to feed the movement Jones supposedly sparks with his one man insurrection. Only through the droll do we get to the expansive legitimacy caricature of Men in Black, or the stoic disillusion of No Country For Old Men, or the warrior who has reached his limit in The Hunted. The reality of Jones' textured bluntness in this is life as hard as it is is complex, much like Crane's feudalism in his little New York town. Beneath the surface, "The Monster" asks many complex questions about moral obligation and social codes, the cruelty of social norms in every demographic. Ingenious novella that it is, if Harper published it today, it would remain a telling fable on the limits of tolerance on all sides of the isle, and nothing has changed in the America of black and white. Crane's naturalism has a veracity Caucasians are now forbidden to depict, the controversy I've sown a case in point.