Now, you could have said The Amazing Howard Hughes was a shot in the dark, just because Jones was Texas aristocracy and he knew some of those rich guys who never said a word for 30 years: people like Howard Hughes’ father, people like Howard himself. But then just five years after that, there he was again as Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song. He won an Emmy for that. Sure, Jones was as smart as hell, and he had been to Harvard - but it was hell he was as smart as. You look at those dark, wicked eyes of his and you don’t have any doubt about the devil he knows. At the same time, I can see those eyes and hear his rat-weasel voice complaining: “All right, I’ve played Howard Hughes and Gary Gilmore. What other western creeps are there? What’s an actor going to do?”The funny thing was that, despite everything, Jones never had trouble getting work. Despite those dead eyes, the desperate lack of charm, what he calls the absence of a sense of humour, and the feeling that you’re looking at the aftermath of an acne holocaust. You might have asked yourself, who is going to cast this guy you’d never pick up if he was a hitch-hiker? Not that he wasn’t brilliant when he wanted to be - look at his Clay Shaw in JFK. And don’t forget the way he’d been in Lonesome Dove: there was a cowpoke who had ridden all over the west.But then he started to do stuff that was kind of shameful: the bad guy in Under Siege, the Irishman in Blown Away. I know, he was frightening in that and he delivered good value, but the film was crap and it didn’t really know or care about the kind of people Jones knew. But there was no stopping him after the Oscar on The Fugitive. He was in Natural Born Killers. He played the most hated baseball player there ever was in Ty Cobb, Two-Face in Batman, and then came the Men in Black rubbish.You just knew the money those things were pulling in, and you had to suppose that Tommy Lee was getting his seven or eight figures sometimes, and I heard that his acreage near San Antonio got a whole lot bigger and soon he had a stable of polo ponies. So you figured that just like anyone, the guy had made his deal with the world, and whose business was it but his? There was US Marshals to come, that damned Rules of Engagement and then - God help us - Space Cowboys, where Jones piled in with Clint Eastwood, James Garner and Donald Sutherland as geezer astronauts back in space.Well, I never bumped into him in those years, but I had a plan if I did: I would look him in the eye and say, “So you sold out.” And see just what he felt inclined to do. After all, he was well past 50 by then, and you know what they say about west Texans past 50 - how they don’t change but just start to smell higher. As I say, I didn’t see him and that was lucky for one of us.Not that I entirely gave up on Tommy Lee Jones. Around 1995, he made a picture for TV - The Good Old Boys - and he directed it himself. It was from a novel, and you could say it was trying to get back to Lonesome Dove, and it wasn’t nearly as good as that. But it let you know Jones had not forgotten.And then in 2003, along came this strange little picture, The Missing, directed by Ron Howard. Cate Blanchett is living out in the middle of the west with her children, when one day the Apaches kidnap one of them. What does she do but go after them, and her long-lost father - a no-good, and a halfbreed - goes with her. And he was Tommy Lee, and you knew straightaway that he had some Cherokee in him. The Missing was so-so, but it was an attempt to get back to a western that had respect for the land and all the savage creatures it supported. And Jones was off in a world of his own, and absolutely terrific.I don’t know what happened to him, and I know for sure that the old hawk wouldn’t say, but it seemed as if he’d discovered where he was from and what he knew - and it wasn’t the kind of vomit that kids make up in LA. In 2005 - and I spell this out because the picture didn’t get a good release and I know people who missed it - he acted in and directed The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. This is one of the great pictures of the new century, about a Texan who has a friendship with a Mexican. And one day a young cop shoots the Mexican. So Jones gets the corpse and the cop and drags them both back to the little town in Mexico where Melquiades came from. You see the picture and you’ll know what the title means.It could have been made by Howard Hawks, or a Sam Peckinpah who never gave in to drink. It was like some little old story out of Faulkner, or maybe Cormac McCarthy - and I mention him because I heard Jones had met up with the writer. Well, I’ll just say that if you like Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - and you should! - Melquiades Estrada is twice the value and calm as a still pond. I love it and I know you would. Of course, it didn’t do a damn thing in the way of business.But by the time the Coen brothers got to make No Country for Old Men, from the McCarthy novel, there was no topping it. This isn’t just good, it’s sensational enough to stop those Coens showing off as to how smart they are. I daresay Jones had a hand in that because he knows the least smart thing about being smart is acting it. So they got Javier Bardem in a haircut that made him like the fiend who walked the west and they asked Josh Brolin to be your regular upstanding Texas rascal, and all Tommy Lee had to do was the sheriff’s nagging speeches - straight out of McCarthy - about how the world was so hellacious a place, he knew he was past retirement age.I know, No Country for Old Men is violent and you should not let it make you think that if you drive through Texas you’ll receive less than the most tremendous, natural hospitality there is. But we all know that that darker world is out there and waiting, and Tommy Lee always had a face that had seen the devil - and while he wasn’t exactly scared, he sure was respectful.You could tell that Bardem was likely to get an Oscar, but Jones had been through that phase a long time ago - it had helped him get his Oscar on The Fugitive. Anyone out of Texas looked at No Country for Old Men and knew that Jones was hitting everything pitched at him now, even if he had this old singsong Texas voice and a manner that seemed ready to fall asleep. And in the very same year, there he was with the same sadness as the father whose son has been ruined by the army in In the Valley of Elah. People didn’t want to see the movie: they were guilty in advance. But if you put The Missing, Melquiades Estrada, No Country for Old Men and In the Valley of Elah in a line, there wasn’t any question about Tommy Lee being the best and hardest actor of his age.A producer I know who has worked with Jones just told me: “I love him. On the surface he’s a very hard man - but a very sweet, sentimental person is there behind it.”He’s relentless. You put him in a picture, he reads that script and very soon no one knows it better. And when he comes to you, he is clearer and more resolved to live up to it than any actor I know. Just now, he’s got a Hemingway book - Islands in the Stream - it was done once before, with George C Scott. It’s about fathers and sons, and he wants to direct it. It will break your heart.”I also heard that he owns the movie rights to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and that he is going around, nodding and listening carefully to everyone who tells him that book is too violent and bloody and there isn’t a way you can film it. And you know he’s remembering their names so he can come back to them later when it’s some kind of monument.Meanwhile, he has just played Inspector Dave Robicheaux, from James Lee Burke’s novels, for the French director Bertrand Tavernier in In the Electric Mist - and that was a lot of location work in Louisiana, with Jones helping on the script. I have a feeling that before he’s done, he’s going to leave a trail of death and destruction. For which we’ll all forgive him, so long as he doesn’t go back to Men in Black. I told him once: some people need to wear black, some are born in it. No Country for Old Men is released today. In the Valley of Elah is released next Friday 25
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