Lone Star (1996) Lightning Paced Tour of John Sayles’s America (Review)

John Sayles, the Don of American independent cinema, has dedicated much of his career to examining and exploring buried and ‘unofficial’ histories. This fascination, this need to tell, has taken Sayles far, from the coal-mining hollers of West Virginia (Matewan) to the tundras of Alaska (Limbo) to Latin/Central America (Men with Guns) and out to the Philippines (Amigo).

But nowhere else in his filmography has this constant theme, this touchstone of a distinguished and committed career, been externalised and made as explicit as in Lone Star, his acclaimed 1996 neo-Western/neo-noir now re-released on a sparkling Criterion Blu-Ray, which hinges on the discovery of the skeletal remains of a long-vanished and psychopathic small-town Texas sheriff (Charlie Wade, played by Kris Kristofferson) and the challenges this unburying provides to the tightly-held legends and personal histories of a small community, a state, and the surviving family and acquaintances of the successor to the dead man’s office, one Buddy Deeds (appearing briefly and portrayed by a baby-faced Matthew McConaughey). 

Sayles has been almost as productive as a novelist as he has been as a filmmaker, having had six titles published between 1975 and 2023. These twin pursuits have bled into each other; one sometimes gets the sense that the individual works could easily switch mediums, so often has Sayles structured his films in the manner of a novelist, working with a precision and an expansiveness that allows for birds-eye view depictions of societies and communities that traverse class, gender, cultural and linguistic barriers. It is an approach that can sometimes create stiff, schematic pictures, over-stuffed with incident and detail and so over-determined that they begin to resemble some of the lesser serialised works of the great Victorian authors, but it can also offer unexpected revelations and new understandings in rich and ’strange’ films that display previously unrealised truths about the complicated inter-dependent mechanics of cities and nations (and the self-perceptions of such) in a manner similar to the television dramas of David Simon. Lone Star is a quintessential creation of its author because it aptly demonstrates so many of these strengths and flaws. 

Sheriff Sam Deeds (frequent Sayles collaborator Chris Cooper) almost immediately suspects that his father Buddy killed his predecessor, having grown up on tales such as the one that the town’s Mayor (and former Sheriff’s Deputy) tells about the threats Buddy made towards Wade on the night of the latter’s disappearance, while being forced to experience a darker side of the local hero first-hand. Wade was an unpopular figure, cruel, violent and corrupt, and one gathers that most of the town was glad to see the back of the man and don’t much care about how this departure was brought about. But Sam is haunted in both his professional and personal life by the memory and myth of his father and seeks out the truth as if looking for a confirmation for himself of the fallibility and tyranny of the beloved Buddy.

Meanwhile, the film draws up two other relationships where the sins of the parent hang heavy over the child. Sam’s old flame Pilar (Elizabeth Pena) struggles to define and defend herself against her mother, Mercedes (Miriam Colon), a one-time illegal immigrant who has become a successful local businesswoman and since scorned her Mexican background; elsewhere, Joe Morton’s Colonel Delmore Payne finds himself stationed back in his hometown and contemplating a confrontation with his absentee father Otis, the owner of a club-bar that is the one place of sanctuary for the African-American inhabitants of this corner of South Texas, while Delmore’s own son Chet (Eddie Robinson) subtly switches allegiances between the two men. 

Deeds’ investigation eventually reveals the role that both these members of the previous generation played in the death of Charlie Wade, while also demonstrating how someone is “neither entirely good nor entirely bad” (with the possible exception of the murdered Sheriff), instead occupying a grey liminal space of compromise, selfishness, justice and self-sacrifice. Deeds’ realisation of the dual nature of man, of the ways in which our selves and our understandings of our selves can become warped and paradoxical when faced with immediate realities untouched by the idealised abstractions of myth and principle, leads to the potentially shocking acceptance of a semi-incestous relationship at the film’s end. A moment of starkness and sweetness that illuminates Sayles’ central message: that the truth must be made evident so as to be reckoned with, whatever the consequence. While the lie of (self-)perpetuance, the comforting story, must be the thing that is actually discarded (“Forget the Alamo,” remarks Pilar in the film’s final line, as she asks Sam to promise to “start from scratch”). 

So it is clear we are reckoning here with America as a whole as much as we are with the domestic space or the specific histories of this borderland. Sayles is not subtle: he gives Otis a fascination with the Black Seminoles that again echoes the overall concern with the marginal and the suppressed. He also gifts Lone Star with one particularly canny cinematic trick that prevents it from becoming an overwhelmingly literary exercise, providing the town’s ghosts a tangible and tactile presence, an omnipresent physicality, through the use of live segues, where the camera drifts away or zeroes in on a singular mundane detail before drawing back and revealing a shift in time, the events of a few decades earlier playing out within the same space and locale as the scene happening in the present. The effect can be mesmerising and haunting, overcoming the cinema’s usual delineation of past and present through flashback structures that refuse to offer both times/narratives the same weight and import. Sayles in this mode is almost Bergsonian, rejecting the idea of the flow of time as a straight line or arrow, instead suggesting a constant inter-penetration of the past into the present, a state in which both times can occupy the same reality and carry the same consequence, while being entirely resistant to efforts at disentangling.

This represents, of course, how Sayles sees his own country. In America, trauma and oppression are not things that can be dismissed, hidden, erased or covered up; the current population(s) live with the consequences of their happenings and their happening forever after, a point which Pena’s Pilar tries to make in an argument with the white governors and parents of the school where she teaches. For these people, the “losers” of the Mexican-American war are being given too much attention and credit in her classes; the atrocities perpetuated on the Mexican people too much focus and the white children too much of an unfair burden to carry. As Pilar reminds them, however, the after-effects of the war have determined every aspect of the lives that people of all races and nationalities have lived in the region (and beyond) to this day: history can never be entirely denied or whitewashed, as it is the predominant determining force of what constitutes power, knowledge and the everyday.

So there is much of worth here. Sayles ably combines tones and sources, travelling between art-pulp (Charlie Wade is a figure right out of Jim Thompson’s classic tales of psychopathic Texan/Southern American law-enforcement like The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280), with a corresponding turn to dutch-angle cinematography and comic-book imagery, soap opera and metaphysical high-modernism. The performances are uniformly excellent, the stench of corruption and decay pungent. But there’s also hardly any room to breathe- the film is simply so full, despite its 135-minute running time (indeed, there are several sub-plots that I haven’t touched on at all here), that it unfolds almost entirely in exceptionally short scenes that are less like Brechtian shards and more like prestige television’s unholy mix of portentous exposition and ‘telling’ conversational cues.

This world has been sharply drawn, but we end up feeling short-changed somehow, like we have passed through it at speed rather than actually allowed to simply exist within it for a short while; as if given a hasty tour by a jaded guide while aching for the chance to just sit and listen in a cafe for a little while. It often feels wrong to ask for a film to be longer, particularly in this age of massively bloated Hollywood wreckage, but an extra fifteen or so minutes wouldn’t have gone amiss: I mentioned Thompson, but if there’s one thing Thompson understood, it was that the joys of both a shaggy dog story and a procedural lay in the longueurs, in the needless, in the ultimately pointless, in the spaces and places where the characters simply inhabit and work within (or against) their dirty little worlds. This is masterful stuff, without a doubt, but you do sometimes wish the master would stop to let us catch up.

BILLY’S ARCHIVE – Lone Star (1996)