Towards the middle of Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada, a film feeling by that point, I think, the wear and tear from a director who rolls out too many films too fast, a film stuck in the desert with eight ways of pointing the camera but no escape from that desert, the action (and the camera) happen upon a blind man living alone in a desolate small house. We know he is blind because he never opens his eyes. He listens to Mexican radio, he says, not because he understands Spanish–he doesn’t–but because he loves “the sound of the language.”
The three main characters, that is one hostage, one hostage-taker, and one corpse, stop a spell to hear the blind man out. He explains, after some pleasantries, that he wants the two live ones to kill him. He has no one left to care for him, he doesn’t care to live alone, and he doesn’t want to commit suicide. That would offend God. The two living ones counter than murder would offend God also. They leave him and the only alive portion of the film, in the sandy heat.
The blind man was and is, of course, drummer/singer/actor Levon Helm, who died April 19th in New York City of cancer. His passing silenced the third and only American-born voice of the the band called the Band, following pianist-singer Richard Manuel, who took his own life in 1986; and bassist Rick Danko, felled by heart failure in 1999. Each man brought a distinctive, respirating texture to singing: Manuel’s falsetto carried melancholy and resignation; Danko’s similar but normal-range timbres caught the deep yearning of the deep-hearted, plus the paranoia of the deep-hearted who feel their desires hidden from them.
Helm, who got to study Elvis, Conway Twitty, and Robert Jr. Lockwood up close growing up, had something distinct from the other two. He could yearn for lost warmth–hear him enrich Manuel on the last verse of “Whispering Pines”–but pleasure, and the necessity from poverty and violence to always remember pleasure, stayed with him. “Ophelia,” another of the Band’s signature tunes, should be a sad song and isn’t, because Levon loses himself in the storytelling.
Levon also managed a film career, trooping bravely through solid structures and shaky mistakes, blockbusters and bottom-of-the-bin. He helped carry The Right Stuff both on and off camera, lending a warmth to the bluster of men who do impossible things because they can and for the bragging rights. In Smooth Talk, he’s a father who wants good for his daughter but finds himself unable to speak except in platitudes, leaving his daughter, Laura Dern, open to the smooth talk of Treat Williams, the snake in the grass.
For Mark Stouffer’s Man Outside, a film so obscure it isn’t listed amongst Levon’s accomplishments at Wikipedia, the director used the four members of the Band then still playing together–all except guitarist Robbie Robertson. Organist Garth Hudson has a quiet, beautiful cameo as a draft dodger who’s hidden in the woods at least LBJ’s day, at first unwilling to make war, then unable to leave what he found. Rick Danko plays the father of the kidnapped child. Richard Manuel has a blink-and-miss-it bit as a vigilante. Levon played the local sheriff and played him as a decent man whose only handicap is the all-too-human lack of a crystal ball. “You’re in deep shit,” he advises the hero when the evidence goes against the hero.
And when the sherrif learns the hero was in the right and a soft, silly man, broken–or more prescisely, never given a chance to grow–was behind the horror, Levon’s eyes do not blaze with rage. He watches the human monster sobbing and something small but precise breaks in his gaze, a sparrow alighting on early-winter thin ice with just enough pressure to snap. Levon, the master behind all these impressions, always knew what he meant.
But he also loved the sound of every language.
