The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada."

A mouthful of a movie title but an impressive big-screen directing debut for Tommy Lee Jones. One of the "Men in Black" who has never (happily) entertained fluffy questions from the media about, say, alien invasions, proves he's got the goods behind the camera.

Tommy Lee Jones puts together a rugged film in "Melquiades Estrada." "Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" Rating: R for language, violence, sexuality. Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper. Director: Tommy Lee Jones. "Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" web site

His worlds -- acting, Texas, horse and cattle ranching -- converge in this movie about a friendship that transcends borders made by man and God, about a mythic journey, about redemption and about a promise that brings heartache, hardship and surprise.

With the help of writer Guillermo Arriaga, he has crafted an old-fashioned Western with a new-fashioned sensibility (a manhunt conducted with helicopters and SUVs) and problems, starting with a trigger-happy border patrolman, Mike Norton (Barry Pepper). Guarding the U.S.-Mexico divide, he is inclined to punch or shoot first and ask questions later, or not at all.

He and his wife, Lou Ann (January Jones), are Cincinnati natives new to Texas. She is bored and lonely, whiling away her time at the local diner. "We were both real popular in high school," Lou Ann tells the waitress (Melissa Leo). "Now it seems like we don't know anybody anymore."

The story opens with the discovery of the corpse of Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo), an illegal Mexican who lived in fear of the border guards, in the West Texas desert. When ranch foreman Pete Perkins (Jones) learns his good friend and employee has been killed, he does what the sheriff refuses to do: investigate.

He also has the additional burden of keeping a promise to Melquiades that, should he die "over here," Pete will carry him back to his family and bury him in his Mexican hometown.

Pete suspects the border patrolman was the shooter and enlists him, at gunpoint, to keep that promise. On horseback, transporting a corpse cradled in cloth and slung across a saddle, they skirt the edge of rocky cliffs, cross expanses of searing sand and encounter snakes, a lonely blind man who makes a sad request and Mexicans heading in the opposite direction.

"The Three Burials" was inspired by the real-life death of Esequiel Hernandez Jr. in May 1997. The 18-year-old was herding his family's goats less than a mile from his home in Radford, Texas, when he was shot and killed by U.S. Marines working on a drug-interception mission.

Jones, incensed by the injustice of the death and lack of charges, sought out writer Arriaga ("21 Grams") to address it through drama. The point of view is as sharp as an arrowhead, and a lawman who is impotent is more than a punch line.

The time element is splintered, so don't expect a chronological story. And while it's a Western in the truest sense, it has some nudity, a reference to an erectile dysfunction drug and what would be considered abuse of a corpse under normal circumstances.

The bond that develops between Pete and Melquiades is presented in abbreviated (and somewhat unsatisfying) snapshots. But "Three Burials" turns the tables and the hunter becomes the hunted, and the powerful must depend on the powerless.

Astride a horse or behind the wheel of a truck, Jones looks at home, and Pepper, whose brittle, brutal shell begins to soften and fall away, has earned one of the movie's four Independent Spirit Award nominations. The women, unfortunately, solve boredom with an age-old solution.

"Three Burials" is a rugged film with thorny, modern-day questions that allows Jones to ride tall in the saddle and director's chair.