The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

“Nobody is beyond redemption.”

In the dry border country of West Texas, a ranch hand named Melquiades Estrada is shot dead, and a young border patrolman, Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), buries him in a shallow grave. His friend Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed) digs the body up, takes Norton prisoner, and sets out on horseback for Mexico to keep an old promise. The two men ride south with the dead man tied to a mule, one of them bound to the other by a debt neither chose.