Tommy Lee Jones's first go in the director's seat smacks all at once of John Sayles's Lonestar, Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, and Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Like Sayles, Jones distills a classic Western theme and relocates it in a modern setting, reincarnating (and also starring as) the lone cowboy who (like Eastwood's William Munny) makes justice his bedfellow to right the negligent death of his friend, Melquiades. A frustrating border problem looms in the background of small-town Texas. Border patroller Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) exhibits an unexplained rage towards the illegal immigrants he gets paid to simply chase back into Mexico; and, later on, a peccadillo that results in Melquiades's death. When the Texas Rangers, the local police, and the border patrollers won't investigate, modern-day cowboy Pete Perkins takes it upon himself to see his personal brand of justice done and his friend's body home.

More than one reviewer has suggested that Eastwood may have been the only other man who could have pulled this part off, but the film engenders doubts that he would have been the right hombre. Jones's tired visage greets the camera like cold bacon and eggs. The aging Texan plays Pete with an easy gravitas, loose in the saddle and patient to make good on a promise to an exile. The film never spells out why the Mexican could not go home, but rather delivers us into the hands of a man willing to wait for something good. The cowboy mystique revels in solitude, men of few words, and calculated actions. Their bond manifests in a series of quiet, lucid flashbacks that culminate when Melquiades asks his only friend to find his wife and family should he die while still in Texas.

"I don't want to be buried under a billboard," he tells Pete.

Pepper plays the emotionally distant border patroller just so, too disaffected to notice his bad marriage, and too out of control to stop beating would-be immigrants at his day job. The officials try to get Mike to stop brutalizing Mexicans, but show serious disinterest in Melquiades's death. As the tight-lipped sheriff, Dwight Yoakam regurgitates incredible talent for the loathsome (think Slingblade) and faces off with Pete over what he dismisses as "just another wetback." Not willing to compromise as filmmaker or hero, Jones takes his character south of the border, hauling along Norton and one very rancid corpse.

Guillermo Arriaga's dialogue alternately tarnishes and shines. At once, he paints the scenery of the Lone Star State with industry and a macabre claustrophobic sense pungent with wit. Norton's estranged wife, Lou-Ann, (Melissa Leo) describes her old home of Cincinnati to the curious waitress (January Jones) who notices her boredom. "Yeah, it's really pretty," Lou-Ann says, childishly believable. "I love the malls."