The first movie that Tommy Lee Jones has directed, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is best understood as a Flannery O'Connor odyssey set along the Texas-Mexico border. The story is gritty and foul at times, but a synopsis is as follows: Violent border patrol guard kills illegal Mexican immigrant accidentally and buries him. His body is found and reinterred by the local sheriff, but not before the Mexican's close friend Pete (Jones) finds out who killed him. He kidnaps the border agent and makes him dig up Melquiades' body, wear his clothes, and ride his horse as they set out in search of the Mexican's hometown of Jimenez. Along the way they meet a blind oracle who teaches them something about their own humanity and mortality, as well as encountering other border-crossers. The "epiphany" scene occurs in a scenic valley in Mexico where Melquiades' third and final burial takes place.

Like an O'Connor story, The Three Burials is filled with fallen, sometimes deviant humans, the grotesque and bizarre, the poignant. We are allowed to see redemption in the transformation of some characters, damnation in the recalcitrance of others. In Jones' recent NPR interview, he noted that The Three Burials "has something to do with...the mechanics of the faith." When pressed to explain what he means, he quotes O'Connor, "Faith is what you know to be true, whether you believe it or not." Jones' undergraduate thesis at Harvard was on Flannery O'Connor, and his debut reflects that influence. The sometimes violent and explicit content of the movie, when understood in this way, has redemptive purpose (as opposed to the typically gratuitous nature of objectionable elements in Hollywood), but may be too much for many who are not accustomed to it.