The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

This cold-blooded Western also illustrates the "action of grace" | Andrew Coffin

All my stories," said Flannery O'Connor, "are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the directorial debut of weather-beaten actor Tommy Lee Jones, is in many ways a remarkable extension of O'Connor's grand Southern gothic tradition. Substituting rural Texas for O'Connor's South, Mr. Jones and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga have created a modern-day Western so hard and brutal as to earn comparison to the cold-blooded Westerns of Sam Peckinpah. Yet the story also illustrates the "action of grace" in unlikely characters and unlikely places, bearing more than a superficial ancestral connection to O'Connor's faith-infused stories.