movie review lone star

Forget the Alamo: The Silver Anniversary of Lone Star

[THIS PIECE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR “LONE STAR,” A FILM RELEASED IN 1996 THAT YOU REALLY SHOULD SEE.]

Released 25 years ago this week, John Sayles’ “ Lone Star ” is the director’s best film and the most wide-ranging and sophisticated drama ever set in Texas. And it is the movie that best understands how Texans mythologize and lie about themselves, and how the lying and mythologizing dovetails with deception and self-deception in the rest of the nation, and the world.

“Lone Star” is set on the border separating Texas from Mexico in the fictional town of Frontera. As the story unfolds, we keep returning to the concept of the frontier as precisely that: a concept, not a real, measurable thing. The idea of “the frontier” nevertheless defined the self-image of white settlers in the 19th century, and powered the next 150 years’ worth of Western fiction, films, and TV series, as well as works in other genres that are essentially Westerns in science-fiction, crime thriller, or action movie drag (see in particular the career of director Walter Hill , who has worked in all four genres but ultimately always makes Westerns.)

But “frontier” means something different to Native Americans, Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Black Americans who were either displaced from their land or prevented from owning land in the first place. To them, the word was not a promise, but a threat. The phrase Manifest Destiny was even scarier, because it meant the assimilation and conquering was ordained by a higher power. The word ‘border,’ likewise, can mean everything or nothing depending on who’s using it. As one “Lone Star” character points out, a bird flying from the US to Mexico doesn’t see, much less recognize, a border.

Sayles’ script starts out telling stories of white, Black, Mexican-American and Mexican people that seem to be unfolding along parallel lines, with rare points of intersection. But when you get to the end, you realize they were never really separate—that, in fact, seemingly independent, self determined lives were set in motion decades ago by actions of parents or ancestors that our main players barely knew (or were told lies about). The result is a web of interdependence that requires representatives of every major demographic group to compromise their values, initially for survival and then (after they assimilate and have children) for land, money, and comfort. The separations cease to be important except as arbitrary markers of power, and by the end of the movie, all boundaries dissolve, even those determined by race, culture, and family bloodline. What makes “Lone Star” feel so honest and timeless is its insistence that its characters are just human beings, and when they act in cowardly, acquisitive, or treacherous ways, they are behaving in accordance with their conditioning, in ways they may not realize. And even when they strive to do their best, they fall short.

The film’s deep bench of characters includes Pilar Cruz ( Elizabeth Peña ), a schoolteacher with an at-risk teenage son; Pilar’s mother Mercedes ( Míriam Colón ), the owner of a thriving local cantina whose husband was murdered long ago under mysterious circumstances; Hollis Pogue ( Clifton James ), the town mayor who was once Buddy’s deputy; Delmore Payne ( Joe Morton , star of Sayles’ superb race fable “The Brother from Another Planet”), an Army colonel who grew up in Frontera and has returned to run the local Army base; and Delmore’s father Otis Payne ( Ron Canada ), owner of Frontera’s only notable Black-owned nightclub, a center for African-American life in a part of the state where Blacks rank a distant third in the political pecking order.

Our guide through the story is Pilar’s former flame, Frontera sheriff Sam Deeds ( Chris Cooper , who became an indie film star playing a labor union organizer in Sayles’ 1987 drama “Matewan” nine years earlier). Sam is the son of legendary lawman Buddy Deeds (played in flashback by a then-unknown Matthew McConaughey ), the only deputy who dared stand up to the police department’s corrupt and vicious sheriff, Charlie Wade ( Kris Kristofferson ). Wade was a two-fisted, pistol-packing, racist grifter who ruled the town in the 1950s and ’60. He carried on like a mob boss, regularly demanding a cut of everyone else’s business, deliverable in cash. Anyone who complained, per “ Goodfellas ,” got hit so bad they never complained again.

Sayles has a genius for coupling textual and physical metaphors, and he opens this film with a doozy. A couple of sculptors who make art from bullets (as Sayles is about to do for the next two-plus hours, and as Western writers and filmmakers had been doing for more than a century) roam with metal detectors on a shooting range near the US Army base. The place doubles as an execution spot for local criminals. The range is described as a “lead mine,” as opposed to a gold mine, but narratively it’s both: in this grim stretch of desert, Sayles’ hybrid Western, film noir, and police procedural takes shape. The artists find a skeleton, a shell casing, a badge, and a Masonic ring. The bones belong to Charlie Wade, who disappeared on the night Buddy publicly stood up to him by refusing to accept a cut of his bribe money or serve as his bag man. Although other suspects are introduced, Sam’s gut tells him that his dad is the killer. Every detail he learns while nosing around places he’s not supposed to go confirms that Buddy was involved in the killing. It’s just a matter of figuring out what was at stake and who else was complicit.

Sayles’ script simultaneously echoes classics of the Western genre (notably John Ford’s meta-Western “ The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ,” about the difference between truth and legend); film noir (the behaviors of both sheriffs echo the corruption of “ Chinatown ” villain Noah Cross, and there are revelations of the forced displacement of poor people by a land developer, as well as a dash of incest); and films and TV programs with an unabashed theatrical feeling. Sayles has been frank about wanting to kick his directing up a notch with this movie, following scattered complaints that his films were too much like illustrated versions of scripts or short fiction, and he achieves that goal and then some. Frontera is shot and portrayed in a naturalistic, understated, “Western-movie” sort of way, the whole “aw, shucks, t’weren’t nothin'” vibe. But Sayles’ direction also permits hints of expressionism and magical realism. And he and his cinematographer, Stuart Dryburgh , convey flashbacks and flash-forwards in-camera, without cuts or dissolves, re-framing to reveal characters from the past existing in the same place as characters from the present.

“Lone Star” is careful not to overdo anything, though, as if safeguarding against the inherent tendency for oversimplification in a screenplay that’s very much about myth-making, storytelling for power and profit, and how the persistence of one narrative often has more to do with who’s behind it than how convincing it is. In the end, Sayles seems to tell us, it’s all theater: political theater, emotional theater. The idea of “the public stage” has rarely been more cogently presented. Sayles embraces the idea of Frontera as a gigantic theatrical set where actors banter through expository revelations and segue into monologues. The latter are often treated as verbal spectacles that do not require flashback imagery to get their points across. Whenever possible, Sayles adopts Ingmar Bergman ’s belief that a great face is all you need.

There’s a sawdust-and-footlights feeling to the characterizations and performances, too—particularly in the ritualized confrontations between men that threaten to erupt into lethal violence. Like the towns in “Liberty Valance” and Wilder’s “Our Town,” and the city blocks in “ Dog Day Afternoon ” and “ Do the Right Thing ” (as well as Sayles’ very Spike Lee-ish 1991 urban drama “City of Hope”), the film feels real and not-real at the same time. The characters are credible as persons who could exist, but also (and how amazing that this is not a contradiction!) as delivery devices for clashing views on political and historical reality, moving viewers through a tale that is, in basic and undeniable ways, a play of ideas. The camera records live-wire threats from angles that mimic the perspective of a theatergoer looking up at performers on a raised stage.

The presentation of Charlie Wade at first feels overcooked, or out-of-sync with the other major characters, because his villainy is so outsized, and he relishes performing it to terrify others (Kristofferson never really got his due as an actor, and this is one of his best performances, oozing racial entitlement and smug nastiness). But we come to understand that this, too, is part of the movie’s design. Through the investigations of Sam and his allies, we learn that Buddy was not actually the antidote to corruption, but merely incarnated a more socially acceptable form of it, in much the same way that the supposed “civilization of the frontier”—a key theme in many Westerns—was a cover story, obscuring how subjugation, bigotry, and rampant greed backed by violence all became institutionalized, subsumed into the normal operations of governments and corporations.

Buddy, it turns out, took a piece of others people’s action, like Charlie before him, just not blatantly. Envelopes of cash never changed hands as far as we know, but Buddy as mayor didn’t see a problem with taking a piece of a real estate development that used eminent domain to seize other people’s land. Nor did he have a problem with using a prisoner on work release to build a deck onto his home for no pay. Charlie was the devil people knew, old and grizzled and hateful, a bad guy who acted like a bad guy: you could practically smell his rottenness. Buddy was the devil, too, in his way—a devil in a white hat, blond and blue-eyed and square-jawed. Maybe he didn’t realize what he truly was. Maybe he just did things, acting on instinct. The new sheriff and future mayor proved a skilled coalition builder and kingmaker, using his official power for private and political gain, securing the political support of Otis Payne and Mercedes Colon by discouraging other entrepreneurs of color from opening businesses that might compete with ones already in existence. He gave people money that wasn’t Buddy’s money to give. There were strings attached, or implied agreements. Buddy’s good deeds always benefited Buddy. He encouraged other people to be Buddy, too. And now many of the adults in Frontera are in relationships of mutually assured destruction based on shared knowledge of each other’s fear, hunger, and guilt. It’s been said that behind every great fortune lies a crime, but “Lone Star” indicates that the same thing can be true of houses, bars, and restaurants.

The murder of Charlie Wade is just one skeleton that Frontera would prefer stay buried, so that money can keep flowing from one end of town to the other, over the border and back. As on HBO’s “The Wire,” corruption persists not because people are evil, but because they’re weak and lazy and would rather not risk discomfort by dismantling the status quo. People in this movie talk about systemic change, but almost nobody actually wants it because it’s too hard. They’d actually be content with getting a bigger slice than whatever they have at the moment. Marginalized outsiders, too, want to tear down the system until someone inside the system offers them a small piece of the action so that they’ll quit yelling. More often than not, they take it. Sayles’ script establishes early that Sam is opposed to building a new prison in Frontera because the town already profits from the state renting local jail cells (Sayles was ahead of the curve in warning audiences against the burgeoning prison-industrial complex). When his Mexican-American chief deputy Ray ( Tony Plana ) asks his blessing to run for sheriff when Sam’s term expires (something that we gather was going to happen no matter what, and was engineered because local power brokers were tired of Sam back-talking them) Sam asks him what he thinks about the scheme to build a new prison. “It’s a complicated issue,” Ray says. “Yeah, Ray,” Sam says, “you’ll be a hell of a sheriff.”

There are always three or four things going on in every scene of Sayles’ script beyond the delivery of plot information. One of the richest is the notion that most major decisions in Frontera—as in Texas, and the United States generally—are driven by ideas of whiteness and white exceptionalism, even though the idea of “whiteness” is as much an agreed-upon lie as the notion of a border. Whiteness is provisional, for one thing. The label can be granted to a person not previously described as such, but it can be revoked if the beneficiary rattles the establishment. Whiteness, as presented here, is about the willingness to join the existing power structure and adopt as many of its customs and practices as you can without repudiating your own people.

Tony is one example of that principle. He’s Mexican-American walks and talks and carries himself like a movie cowboy who’d be played by Gary Cooper or Kevin Costner . Another is Mercedes, who came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant but refuses to employ “wetbacks” and calls the U.S. Border Patrol when she sees illegals on her property. There is some dialogue suggesting that Delmore Payne’s decision to join the U.S. Army—a racist institution for much of its existence, both in terms of how it exercised force against other cultures and how it treated its own nonwhite members—represents a capitulation, and that he’s trying to break the spirit of his son Chet (Eddie Robinson), setting the stage for oppressive behavior to repeat itself. What is the history of Texas, and by extension America, Sayles suggests, but that of generations of undesirables climbing the ladder to success any way they can, then pulling it up behind them?

That this film’s insights come from a filmmaker born and raised in Hoboken, New Jersey, seems less like an irony than an inevitability. If you take the stereotypical boastful, bigger-than-life Texan at their word, and accept that Texas not only used to be its own country (the cowboy myth of self-reliance and reinvention applied to an entire US state) but still believes that it is one, that would make Sayles a foreigner. And if there’s one thing that the history of art has taught us, it’s that sometimes it takes a foreigner to cut through all the bullshit and show us the truth about a place.

I don’t use the word “us” lightly. Before I was a New Yorker, I was a Texan—specifically a white Texan, a distinction that’s crucial to understanding what Sayles is doing in “Lone Star.” Being a white Texan means being indoctrinated with an official self-image of what it means to be a white Texan. Despite occasional shamefaced apologies and self-chastisements, the white Texan is the only kind of Texan to whom the image of The Texan—the soft-spoken tough guy with the ten-gallon hat and six-shooters and square jawline, standing up for truth and justice and independence—truly applies. The ground shifted a little bit in 1981, when the demographics of South Texas allowed the election of Henry Cisneros, a Mexican-American, as the first nonwhite mayor of San Antonio. (The last time a person of color held that job was 1842, when Juan Seguin , a Tejano-Spanish military and political figure who sided with the breakaway Texans in their fight against Antonio López de Santa Anna .)

I spent over 20 years of my life in the Lone Star state, a part of the former Confederacy, and I can testify to the level of indoctrination that every Texan of every color received through the educational system and popular culture until pretty recently. State law required a semester of Texas history for all middle schoolers, and again in high school. “History,” alas, meant white supremacist propaganda. My textbooks taught my schools’ racially diverse student bodies that even though slavery was wrong, the Union’s violation of the concept of “State’s Rights” (i.e., the right to own other human beings, though the books were careful not to dig into that) was somehow equally wrong, and that it was hurtful and incorrect to describe Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, as a traitor, because from his point-of-view, and the points-of-view of people who supported him, the Union was cruel and tyrannical.

Students of my generation were also taught that it was wrong for the Union to “punish” the South after it lost the war (though, as even a cursory study of Reconstruction demonstrates, there wasn’t all that much “punishment” against traitors compared to what has happened in other countries where parts of the population tried to break away and form their own country). And former Confederates quickly figured out ways to disempower former slaves who had been briefly empowered, eventually leading to Jim Crow laws, which didn’t begin to be seriously challenged until the Civil Rights marches of the 1950s and 1960s. In regular US History courses, I learned that the Radical Republicans, who wanted legally-enforced freedom and agency for former slaves, were the bad guys in the post-Civil War period; and that president Andrew Johnson , an obstructionist of racial progress, was vilified for daring to undermine them, and never got a fair shake. In the U.S.-Mexico war, according to official Texas history books, Mexico was the bad guy, white “settlers” who had claimed portions of Texas for themselves were the good guys, and the battle of the Alamo represented a heroic act of defiance against the intransigent, control-freak dictatorship of Santa Ana. It wasn’t until university that I learned about complicating factors that conveniently got left out of my earlier studies, such as the fact that many white Texans wanted to break away from Mexico because Mexico refused to allow the importation of new slaves after 1830.

All this information likely meaningless to anyone from outside the United States. But hopefully it gives some sense of what sort of “history” was being taught in Texas schools in the late 20th century, and the way in which official history tends to get shaped and reinforced and passed down in civilizations all over the world, past as well as present. With its plainspoken understanding of politics as theater and history as myth, “Lone Star” should be taught in Texas schools alongside the official texts. Let the books tell students to remember the Alamo, and let “Lone Star” tell them to forget it.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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FILM REVIEW

FILM REVIEW;Sleepy Texas Town With an Epic Story

By Janet Maslin

June 21, 1996

THE great, stirring epic "Lone Star" stands as a peak in the career of John Sayles, who already has such admirably serious films to his credit. Long admired for the independence and quiet intelligence of his work, Mr. Sayles this time delivers a vibrant history lesson about a Texas border town.

Gratifyingly complex and beautifully told, this tale explores a huge array of cultural, racial, economic and familial tensions. In the process, it also sustains strong characters, deep emotions and clear dramatic force. Plain and forthright as it looks, "Lone Star" winds up with a scope and overview rarely attempted in American films today, which makes its success that much more exemplary. Every moment of the film, from the quiet foreshadowing of its first scene to a magnificently apt ending, is utterly right.

Sometimes decent but didactic in his earlier work (including "Matewan," "Eight Men Out," "Passion Fish" and "The Secret of Roan Inish"), Mr. Sayles this time displays nothing but soft-spoken grace. And he handles this film's dozens of significant characters and the many interwoven strands of its story line with ease. As writer, director and editor of "Lone Star" (the fluid editing is a particular asset, letting the story glide seamlessly between past and present), he assures the viewer that this film's many elements will converge in ways that are meaningful and moving. Indeed, "Lone Star" exists so far outside the province of slam-bang summer movies that it seems part of a different medium and a different world.

The place is Frontera, Tex., a sleepy little town on the Rio Grande. And the film's first sight is that of two Army officers cataloguing fauna in the nearby desert. ("You live in a place, you should know something about it," one of them says.) In the process, they unearth what are probably the remains of Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson), who in 1957 was the town's bullying sheriff. In the present day, the crime will be investigated by Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), whose father, Buddy (Matthew McConaughey), was Charley Wade's deputy and is now the prime suspect in Charley's murder.

This crime story, while well told, serves "Lone Star" more as pretext than plot. Sending Sam Deeds off to explore the past, the film also examines Sam's troubled memories of life in his father's shadow and looks at the Frontera where Buddy once wielded great power, especially over its black and Hispanic citizens. Drawn into this exploration are whole families of other characters, and their pasts are tied to Buddy Deeds in ways that are made clear by the film's stunning denouement. In each of these stories, parents and children display stubborn, warring ways of looking at the past.

So Delmore (Joe Morton), the rigid black colonel newly put in charge of the local Army base, is estranged from Otis (Ron Canada), who runs the only local bar where black soldiers feel welcome. Del's attitude is not softened by the fact that Otis happens to be his father, nor is he able to behave less rigidly with Chet (Eddie Robinson), his own son.

As the film moves smoothly among dozens of characters, in a style Mr. Sayles also used somewhat more stiffly in "City of Hope," the viewer also meets Pilar (Elizabeth Pena), Chet's history teacher.

"What are we seeing here, Chet?" she asks sternly, finding her student more interested in drawing cartoons than in studying Texas' violent past. "Uh, everybody's killing everybody else," Chet answers hastily. Pilar can hardly accuse him of missing the point.

It happens that Pilar, as Mr. Sayles gradually lets the audience know, is Sam Deeds's first love, and that as teen-agers they were kept apart by both Buddy Deeds and Mercedes Cruz (Miriam Colon), Pilar's stern, prosperous mother. Shades of the past color the film's portrait of Mercedes as well as its long view of Sam and Pilar, who are able to rekindle their romance with surprising passion. It's worth mentioning that Mr. Sayles films a startlingly tender bedroom scene between these two without nudity or graphic sex and without failing to communicate that they are deeply in love.

In Sam and Pilar, "Lone Star" finds not only a romance, but also an embodiment for its central ideas: about crossing borders, challenging the past, escaping the burden of history. These themes echo everywhere in a film that eloquently weaves together the multi-faceted life of Frontera and grasps the importance of race or privilege or politics in every transaction.

From a parents' meeting at school to negotiations over the town's new jail to Charley Wade's ruthless bullying of local minorities, the film effortlessly incorporates a broad political awareness into its drama. One of its most subtly spellbinding scenes finds Del interrogating a young black private over her drug use, and finding his own view of the Army changed by a single conversation.

This long, spare, contemplatively paced film, scored with a wide range of musical styles and given a sun-baked clarity by Stuart Dryburgh's cinematography, is loaded with brief, meaningful encounters like that one. And it features a great deal of fine, thoughtful acting, which can always be counted on in a film by Mr. Sayles. Though none of the actors are given much screen time, a remarkable number of them create fully formed characters in only a few scenes.

Mr. Kristofferson does a superb, unflinching job as the film's personification of racist evil; Mr. Canada and Clifton James (as the mayor) capture the tensions between Frontera's black and white characters as well as a certain brotherhood under the skin. Mr. Morton and Ms. Colon both illustrate the high price of repressing one's true nature, though nobody here has the two-dimensional nature of a symbolic figure. All the film's characters are flesh and blood.

Mr. Cooper brings grit and dignity to the film's pivotal role, perfectly in keeping with the film's tacit style. The sultry Ms. Pena gives an especially vivid performance as the character who is most unsettled by shadows of the past. The film is greatly helped by the fact that neither of these two looks or acts like a movie star and that they blend effortlessly into the texture of small-town life. "Lone Star" does glimpse flashes of Hollywood magnetism in Mr. McConaughey, who makes a riveting impression even though he appears only briefly. Buddy Deeds is meant to be feared and imagined more than he is seen.

Also outstanding are Gabriel Casseus playing Otis as a proud young black man in 1957, when it was clearly dangerous to behave that way, and Frances McDormand as Sam's jumpy, over-medicated ex-wife. Tiny roles are also memorably etched, as in the brief appearance by Beatrice Winde as the widow of a principal in a murder case, an old lady busily playing Game Boy. Sam introduces himself politely, but she remembers Buddy too well to resist a wisecrack: "Sheriff Deeds is dead, honey. You just Sheriff Junior."

"Lone Star" is about watching a whole town, and perhaps a whole society, emerging from such long shadows.

"Lone Star" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes mild profanity, racial insults, brief violence and one very discreet sexual situation.

Written, directed and edited by John Sayles; director of photography, Stuart Dryburgh; music by Mason Daring; production designer, Dan Bishop; produced by R. Paul Miller and Maggie Renzi; released by Castle Rock Entertainment. Running time: 138 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Chris Cooper (Sam Deeds), Elizabeth Pena (Pilar), Miriam Colon (Mercedes Cruz), Matthew McConaughey (Buddy Deeds), Kris Kristofferson (Charley Wade), Clifton James (Mayor Hollis Pogue), Frances McDormand (Bunny), Ron Canada (Otis Payne), Joe Morton (Delmore Payne), Eddie Robinson (Chet Payne), Gabriel Casseus (young Otis) and Beatrice Winde (Minnie Bledsoe).

Lone Star [1996] Review – A Powerfully Tangled Drama on the Onerous Burden of Shared Personal History

“Set in the Texas border town of Frontera, Lone Star is a complex and ultimately rewarding tale of fractured relationships in an incredibly diverse American community.”

John Sayles is one of the quintessential and most under-rated American independent film-makers. He made his debut feature Return of the Seacaucus Seven in 1979, in the era of New Hollywood when already the American indie film circuit, bolstered by film-makers like John Cassavettes, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese , David Lynch, have started to explore multitude of American subjects, oft-neglected by the pompous main-stream products of Hollywood. These pioneering works of the 1970s laid the strong platform for thriving American indie-film movement, which progressed under the subsequent generation of directors, from Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch to Steven Soderbergh , Richard Linklater, and Jeff Nichols. John Sayles has made eighteen diverse and idiosyncratic feature films over his three-plus decade directorial career. He has made a well-meaning lesbian drama Lianna (1983), exploring themes which still remains uncommon. A film about a black Alien stranded in Harlem neighborhood (The Brother from Another Planet, 1984), a movie on the violent chapter of American labor movement in early 20 th century (Matewan, 1987), a drama on complex inner-city ethnic clashes (City of Hope, 1991), a touching docudrama on a downcast victim of an accident (Passion Fish, 1992) and with each film Mr. Sayles has continued to subvert expectations and has withstood the constraints of genre narrative.

Nevertheless, it’s important to note that Sayle didn’t hate genre cinema. In fact, he started his career writing scripts for derivative yet profitable b-movies (Piranha, The Howling). In his interviews, Sayles reiterates that writing generic screenplays for others gave him a much clearer perspective when taking over the directorial duties. Sayles insists that although his films boast the basic structure of a genre cinema, he gained the ability to instill his own worldview into the structure due to his early writing jobs for Roger Corman and Joe Dante. Even though the indie film-maker’s works from the 2000s haven’t collected a great many awards or earned festival attention, he continues to churn out distinct films (he is currently penning the script for Django Lives! Franco Nero reprises his role as the coffin-dragging gunfighter). Eminent film critic Roger Ebert has persistently championed the works of John Sayles. He hailed him as ‘a rebuke to directors who complain they can’t get their dream films off the ground’ , further stating that ‘ He is the complete independent director, self-starting, autonomous, one-stop shopping’ . It is through Ebert’s reviews I discovered John Sayles’ oeuvre (Sayles himself once mentioned that ‘Siskel & Ebert’ show familiarized his works among broader American audience).

While profiling the director’s cinema, Roger Ebert remarks, “Sayles’ films aren’t exercises in style, like so many Sundance titles. They’re about something; about relationships, society, and politics.” Sayles reflected on those clashes between cultural, social, and economic issues through a limited perspective as well in an epic format. If there is one quintessential movie which elegantly and broadly intertwined Sayles’ themes and ideas, then it must be his novelistic multi-generation and multi-ethnic tale titled Lone Star (1996). Set in the Texas border town of Frontera, Lone Star is a complex and ultimately rewarding tale of fractured relationships in an incredibly diverse American community. The film starts off as a familiar murder mystery with a middle-aged, white-skinned sheriff, raking up misdeeds of the past. But Sayles moves away from the perspective of the Anglo world and focuses on the town’s majority Mexican community and the minority African-American community. By moving through these co-existing yet parallel worlds, Sayles brings forth multiple three-dimensional characters, who despite their difference in class, skin-tone, and culture are connected to each other in interminable ways.

John Sayles is a master when it comes to immersing audiences into an atmosphere. In Lone Star, he sets up the town’s conflicting cultural and historical perspectives in a subtly profound manner. As a matter of fact, the town serves as a microcosm of the tumultuous nature of all American borderland states. In one early scene, set around a school-board meeting, Anglo teachers complain about fellow Hispanic teacher Pilar Cruz (Elizabeth Pena) for teaching the harsh realities of both sides in the Mexican-American War. One white teacher remarks, “We won, we get bragging rights.”

Related to Lone Star: Dead Man [1995] – The Poetry of the Sinners

But Sayles doesn’t draw a clear demarcation point in the conflict between Hispanics, whites, African-Americans, and Native Americans. When it comes to issues of business and political power, the ethnic or racial division becomes obscured. To dig deeper into the dense complexities of this diversified community, Sayles uses the intrigue of a murder mystery. Lone Star opens with the excavation of the nearly four-decade-old skeleton, believed to be the remains of long-missing former sheriff Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson). The skeleton with its gaping mouth seemed to be laughing at the mistakes of the past which are about to come to light and haunt the present. The figurative skeletons of Frontera’s past – its unremitting racism and secret relationships – are now being sought out by Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper).

Sam is the son of the town’s legendary figure Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), who took over the sheriff duties after the alleged disappearance of Charley Wade. Sam who lived in the shadow of his father’s legend had a very troubled relationship with him. Buddy is respected across the black, Hispanic, and Anglo communities, and the town is about to commemorate Buddy with a bronze statue. Sam is doubtful of his deceased father’s god-like status and firmly believes he is behind the killing of Wade. Sam quietly approaches various personalities in the community in search of the truth. Almost all of them insist upon the sadistic and racist temperament of Charley Wade. Over the course of an investigation, Sam’s own past in the town sneaks upon him. He tries to rekindle his relationship with old high-school sweetheart Pilar, who is now a school teacher. Pilar is the mother of two teenage children whose husband has recently passed away. She is also the daughter of Mercedes Cruz (Miriam Colon), a successful Mexican restaurant owner who somehow rejects her Hispanic identity. “In English, please! We are in the U.S.”, she censures at the Mexican workers in her restaurant.

In a way, the narrative is more about three central characters learning the truth about their parents than about discovering the identity of a killer in a 40-year-old murder. Apart from Sam Deeds and Pilar Cruz, the other important character in Lone Star is Colonel Delmore Payne (Joe Morton), who has taken charge of the soon-to-be-closed military base situated in the town. Delmore holds bitter feelings towards his absentee father Otis Payne (Ron Canada), the town’s unofficial historian and beacon of small African-American community. Otis runs a bar, which he says is the only comfortable, relaxing place for the town’s black population. In the past, Otis Payne has faced immense troubles from Charley Wade. Sam’s obsession with the case eventually brings out the truth, yet what’s endlessly intriguing about the narrative is how all the well-crafted characters reach the point of realization and eventually seek out redemption.

In his four-star review of Lone Star , Roger Ebert wrote, “This is the best work yet by one of our most original and independent filmmakers……it’s about how people try to live together at this moment in America.” John Sayles discloses the racial complexity of American towns like no other American drama, without succumbing to the temptation of portraying one side as corrupt or bad. Despite the superb multi-layered script, the film wouldn’t have been this majestic if not for Sayles’ restrained directorial approach. With each diverse vignette, he introduces new characters and scenarios yet elegantly guides us towards the truth, eschewing the feelings of a disjointed narrative. The most stand-out aspect of Sayles’ direction is his skillful use of flashbacks to deepen and progress the narrative. When the characters recollect an event from the past, Sayles doesn’t employ cuts or dissolves but rather uses a smooth tracking shot to make the transition into the past, as if the characters’ younger and older selves co-exist in the same frame, their clear-cut memories firmly attached to the dusty landscapes. Sayles is often accused of lacking an exciting visceral style, but with Lone Star he operated at the top of his creative power, incorporating stylistic transitions in a non-contrived manner.

Lone Star may not work for those expecting a twisted murder mystery. Staying true to his novelist roots, Sayles takes his sweet time to realize each character, even the ones occupying the tale’s periphery, before disclosing the vital plot points. This may endlessly frustrate viewers expecting a thrilling narrative. Take the interracial relationship between the officers at army base or the scene when Colonel Delmore tries to reprimand a black female soldier (Chandra Wilson) or the drawn-out conversation between Sam and his estranged, half-crazy, football-obsessed wife (Frances McDormand), all these sub-plots doesn’t have anything do with the narrative’s central mystery.

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Nevertheless, these casual exchanges bring richness to the characters and the atmosphere. Moreover, some of the movie’s memorable lines hail from such digressive yet beautiful scenes (“it’s always heartwarming to see a prejudice defeated by a deeper prejudice”, “This stretch of road runs between nowhere and not much else”, “So I’m part Indian? By blood you are. But blood only means what you let it”……….). The other major reason for Lone Star’s near-masterpiece status is the picture-perfect casting. Chris Cooper, one of Sayles’ frequent collaborators, proves what a measured actor he is, conveying his character’s depth and humanity without using unnecessary hysterics. The rest of the ensemble from Elizabeth Pena, Kris Kristofferson, Joe Morton to Ron Canada and Matthew McConaughey (a cameo role), each of the actors play their role in a subtle and enthralling manner.

Lone Star (135 minutes) is one of the best and fascinating works of American independent cinema. It uses a volatile backdrop of a borderland town to pit the threatening nature of a darker past against the endurance of love. The final outcome is free of contrivances and saturated with feelings of compassion and quiet sadness.

Arun Kumar is an ardent cinebuff, who likes to analyze movie to its minute detail. He believes in the transformative power and shared-dream experience of cinema.

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Why John Sayles’ quietly compelling ‘Lone Star’ is well worth revisiting | Movies with Moira

Editor’s note: In this feature, running every other week, Seattle Times movie critic Moira Macdonald shares her love of certain movies and what makes them great — in the hope of inspiring some of your at-home entertainment choices.

“Gotta be careful where you’re pokin’,” says a character to sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper). “Who knows what you’ll find.”

John Sayles, in his many films, always creates worlds that are layered, complex and recognizable; never more so than in my favorite of his films, the noirish Western drama “Lone Star.” Celebrating its 25 th anniversary this year, it’s both murder mystery and tense portrait of a small Texas border town where past and present uneasily rub shoulders at the local bar. Sayles (who wrote, directed and edited the film) expertly entwines the various storylines, sliding like a snake in and out of different time periods, letting his camera linger on someone’s haunted face.

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After the film’s opening scenes reveal a skeleton discovered on an old shooting range, we meet the three main characters, each locked in a struggle with the past. Sam, whose late father Buddy Deeds (played in flashbacks by a young, electric Matthew McConaughey) was the town’s adored previous sheriff, is a slouchy khaki-clad stick of a man — quiet, competent and good at hiding inner turmoil. His father’s legacy is complicated — they didn’t get along — and Sam, newly returned to town after a divorce, is carrying a desperate torch for his Mexican American high school sweetheart, the wearily beautiful Pilar (Elizabeth Peña), now a teacher and recent widow. Their relationship, interrupted long ago when their parents disapproved, tentatively begins to resume.

Meanwhile, a new commander of the town’s army base, Colonel Delmore Payne (Joe Morton) arrives with his family; he’s the estranged son of Otis Payne (Ron Canada), who owns a bar that’s the center of the town’s Black community. All of these stories become connected as the film’s central mystery begins to take center stage: That skeleton is quickly determined to be the remains of vicious, racist former sheriff Charlie Wade (played by Kris Kristofferson in flashbacks), who mysteriously disappeared long ago. Sam, compelled to solve the crime, goes poking into the past, knowing that he might learn some things he’d rather not know.

He does, and we do, but the beauty of “Lone Star” is how we become a citizen of that border town: listening to conversations, feeling the heat of the evening, watching as tensions — racial, sexual, cultural — simmer. (One character notes, of the town, “Most folks don’t want salt and sugar in the same jar.”) We travel back in time with the characters, seeing Charlie’s violence, Sam and Pilar’s young love, Pilar’s mother Mercedes’ youth. Sayles slips us into the past with a graceful swing of the camera, reminding us that people change while places quietly wait. All of this is beautifully intertwined with music, both in its atmospheric soundtrack of songs of many genres (blues, Tejano, country) and the lilt of the language itself; note how the names “Buddy Deeds” and “Charlie Wade,” with their matching syllables, seem to play the same tune.

And this story of family and legacy — fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, memories and secrets — is given life by a remarkable troupe of actors, each of whom Sayles gives time to breathe. Note Morton’s impeccable posture, a structure within which he holds his own pain; listen to the throaty richness of Peña’s voice as she slowly begins to let Sam back into her heart; watch as Cooper’s Sam gazes at Pilar like she’s a dream he doesn’t want to wake up from. Even the tiniest parts are impeccable: Frances McDormand — who won an Oscar that same year, for “Fargo” — is on-screen for maybe five minutes as Sam’s troubled ex-wife, Bunny; she makes the character, who struggles with mental illness, briefly hold the movie in her hands.

Made on a tiny budget, “Lone Star” was a big hit on the arthouse circuit on its release, with Sayles earning an Oscar nomination for his original screenplay. But I wonder if the very quietness that makes it so compelling has caused it to be somewhat forgotten; I was surprised that there isn’t a Criterion edition of this film, nor is it easy to find. But it’s worth poking around to locate “Lone Star”; unlike Sam, you’ll have no regrets over what you uncover.

Directed by John Sayles, 1996, rated R for brief language, sex and violence. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube and other services; available on DVD from Seattle Public Library and King County Library System, or try Reckless Video or Scarecrow Video for rental.

Lone Star (1996)

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Amazon Prime Video Review 2024

A slow burn with a scorcher of an ending you’ll never see coming.

What it's about

All kinds of lines — those separating good and bad, past and present, and even international borders — are blurred in this neo-Western gem. Though it’s entirely set in a small Texas border town, Lone Star pulls off all the gravity and sweep of an epic thanks to its seemingly-micro-actually-macro focuses and sprawling ensemble. It’s all kickstarted by the discovery of a skull in the scrub near Frontera, Texas; Sheriff Sam Deeds (a quietly captivating Chris Cooper) thinks he knows who it belongs to and who might have buried it there: his deceased father Buddy (Matthew McConaughey), the much-loved former sheriff of the town whose shadow Sam has long been living in.

And so an investigation of this historic crime begins, unearthing along the way many more skeletons — both individual and national — as Sam interviews those who knew his father and the victim. Lone Star’s brilliance is in the way it entwines with Sam’s investigation a broader exploration of America’s sins and their lingering legacies, particularly the many-headed effects of its history of racism. Lone Star weaves its political and personal elements together with seamless flourish, making for a rich tapestry of America’s past and present that never sidesteps the grander questions it provokes.

What stands out

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Cast & crew

User reviews

A Walking Contradiction, Partly Truth & Partly Fiction

reelreviewsandrecommendations
Oct 5, 2022

A good watch for those who missed it in 1996.

Apr 6, 2002

Texas state of mind

Aug 14, 2014

A rich tapestry 2 hours flew by

bob the moo
Apr 4, 2003

Sayles' Masterpiece

ProfessorFate
Dec 12, 2000

Great movie -- one of the few I watch over and over.

Jul 7, 2005

A Can of Worms...

Sep 5, 2020

One of the best movies ever.

Jul 5, 2004

All Over the Place

Jun 8, 2020

John Sayles' best movie

lee_eisenberg
Oct 18, 2005

The editing is stunning

JuguAbraham
Nov 19, 2005

An entrancing yarn.

Oct 14, 2001

too much sub plots

petersjoelen
Mar 13, 2024

Flashback transition drinking game, anyone?

Jan 18, 2021

The sins of the fathers come back to haunt

Jan 30, 1999
Sep 12, 2001

My favourite film of all time.

Sep 10, 1999

West done right

Mar 2, 2010

Underrated Masterpiece By One Of America's Greatest Independent Filmmakers

gogoschka-1
Feb 10, 2018

Liked the screenplay of this fine Texas crime thriller

shashank_1501
Feb 8, 2024

Story Telling Masterpiece

Feb 1, 2019

Who is voting here?

Apr 21, 1999

See it, and then see Touch of Evil!

Sep 9, 1999
marmar-69780
Feb 11, 2020

WARNING- more of a "by the numbers" political/history movie, rather than a gripping drama/mystery

Jun 19, 2022

Time Out says

Release details.

Duration: 135 mins

Cast and crew

Director: John Sayles
Screenwriter: John Sayles
Chris Cooper
Matthew McConaughey
Elizabeth Peña
Kris Kristofferson
Stephen Mendillo
Clifton James
Miriam Colon
Frances McDormand

Been there, done that? Think again, my friend.

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Lone Star Reviews

one Star is a richly and densely achieved movie that gets a lot of storytelling done in two and a quarter hours; it is thoughtful and complex and grownup.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 15, 2024

If you haven’t seen "Lone Star" before, you’ll be gob-smacked a movie this good isn’t talked about more.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 25, 2024

John Sayles’s Lone Star is among the most literary films ever made.

Full Review | Jan 24, 2024

Sayles is able to touch on the humanity of each [character] and the details of the region -- the heat, the beautiful but often unforgiving landscape, and especially the pride of the residents -- are vivid and true.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 6, 2023

A large-ensemble mystery of a scope far greater than the mere question of whodunit.

As a graveyard of forgotten dreams spawns a truly revolutionary vision of the future, it's clear that it is precisely Sayles' willingness to confront myth, reality and responsibility... that makes Lone Star a film of such grandeur.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 6, 2023

This brilliant film, the year's best so far, has the feel of a novel, but what... John Sayles has really created is epic cinematic poetry. It's resplendent with border-town atmosphere, heated by torrid weather and searing emotions.

Full Review | Sep 6, 2023

The geographic space of Lone Star has a singular historical, psychological and emotional resonance within the intimate life of those who inhabit it. [Full review in Spanish]

John Sayles' Lone Star contains so many riches, it humbles ordinary movies. And yet they aren't thrown before us, to dazzle and impress: It is only later, thinking about the film, that we appreciate the full reach of its material.

Lone Star offers all the satisfaction of a deftly structured, deeply intelligent novel or a luminous canvas for the imagination -- not to mention a mirror for the subjective processes of memory and desire.

I can't stress enough the excellence of Sayles' script... He packs an incredible number of supporting characters and telling vignettes into a story that contains real tension, genuine romance and stunning surprises.

Sayles remains, above all else, a great screenwriter, and this is a deft piece of writing, perhaps the best of his career. Lone Star demands your undivided attention -- and it rewards it tenfold.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 6, 2023

Mr. Morton seems to get better with every film, and Mr. Kristofferson gives his best performance in years. Mr. Cooper and Ms. Pena are particularly effective in a textured relationship that brings the movie to its enigmatic close.

Lone Star is a crisp, original work that is equally intriguing as a mystery, a romance, and a tale of a town's history. As the border town is a microcosm of America, you could say most of us will be able to relate to this fine movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 6, 2023

Sayles takes us deep into the heart of Texas darkness and, by extension, into our nation's con dieted heritage. That he does so with such literate intelligence, subtle humor and implacable humanism is what makes Lone Star invaluable.

Sayles may be the last of the red-hot ideologues, but he's also still the wide-eyed schoolkid who, given one wish, would ask for peace on Earth.

It might be overstating things to declare that entertainment values have finally been introduced to a Sayles picture. But this time, at least, you can appreciate his film without having to work too hard.

Thanks to a stupendous screenplay, each member of the cast is vividly drawn.

Cooper is appropriately restrained and subdued as Sam. Kristofferson burrows into the role of the of a sinister Charlie Wade... Elizabeth Pena brings grace and intelligence to her role as Pilar. Ron Canada is natural and relaxed as Otis.

The subplots mesh beautifully. And the ending delivers two twists that are both surprising and believable. Sayles, an ingenious maverick, has hit the mark again.

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The ’90s Matthew McConaughey Western That Showed the Border Before the Wall

Writer-director john sayles on what’s changed—and what hasn’t—since lone star ..

In his long career as an independent writer-director, John Sayles has never had a success like 1996’s Lone Star , which was financed immediately, supported in its release, and seen by a relatively wide audience. He even received an Oscar nomination for the film’s masterful screenplay, which slides from the past to the present in a Texas border town. In the 1950s, deputy Buddy Deeds (a young Matthew McConaughey) faces off against a racist sheriff (Kris Kristofferson). In the 1990s, Deeds’ son Sam (Chris Cooper), now the town’s sheriff, investigates a skeleton found outside town—along with a rusted Rio County police badge. When Sam reencounters his high school flame (Elizabeth Peña), it becomes clear that secrets from the past can’t stay buried forever.

Thoughtful, elegantly structured, and evenhanded, Lone Star interweaves stories of the border’s Anglo, Tejano, and Black communities. This American independent landmark is now joining the Criterion Collection , and I talked to Sayles about how he assembled the movie’s stacked cast, how he shot the film’s elegant mixing of the past and the present, and what’s happening at the Texas-Mexico border these days. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Written and directed by John Sayles. The Criterion Collection.

Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. Thank you for your support.

Dan Kois: Last time I talked to you, it was about Matewan , which was a real battle to get financed. Lone Star happened at a different time in your career. You had made more movies, and you had an Oscar nomination under your belt. Was this one easier to finance, or were you paying for it from the money you got rewriting Apollo 13 ?

John Sayles: We got lucky. We got to make it fairly shortly after I wrote it. Castle Rock got interested in Lone Star , and Castle Rock had been on kind of a winning streak. Rob Reiner, who I’d worked for as a writer, had had some successes. Billy Crystal was working with them. They just believed in the movie. When it came out, they spent more money than anybody has ever spent on one of our movies before. So it is the most seen of any of our movies in a movie theater.

I remember when I saw this movie in the theater, it was right as Matthew McConaughey fever was sweeping the nation. How did he end up in this one?

I had seen him in Dazed and Confused , and I knew Rick Linklater, who told me Matthew wasn’t an actor, he was a film student—but he had so much charisma Rick kept expanding the part.

Wooderson just got bigger and bigger.

Right. I needed a guy who knew how to wear the boots and the hat and could have a confrontation with Kris Kristofferson without standing up, and I thought he could do it. By the time we did the wrap party, Matthew had gone and auditioned for the next movie, the one that kind of made him a star. I forget which one it was.

It’s A Time to Kill , I think.

Right, A Time to Kill . But we kind of just had this feeling. Oh, this guy’s going to be around.

Well, he is very believable as someone who’s going to turn into a legend, which is the point of the role.

And that nice combination of a comfort in front of the lens, which you certainly saw in Dazed and Confused , but also intensity when you needed it.

And Chris Cooper has that too, in a slightly more subdued way.

Chris probably would be a good sheriff. Even if he didn’t like the job, he’d probably be a pretty good sheriff. It’s like Frances McDormand. I remember seeing a movie where she was supposed to be playing the head of intelligence or something like that, and I said, Well, Frances could do that , and it’s just the quality she has. You believe that. And then she came down and did a day on this movie, a very different part for us, and she can turn that on too.

She plays Chris Cooper’s ex-wife, a high-strung football fan. She just did that all in one day?

Oh, yeah. It was just pure adrenaline.

I was really struck by Elizabeth Peña’s performance, seeing the movie this time around. That character’s so filled with yearning, but also so spiky, and the movie really does not work at all without a performance like that.

Liz was in a TV series that I wrote called Shannon’s Deal . She could do really heavy, serious stuff—she’d done a lot of theater—and she could do comedy at the same time. But also, there’s something really, really sensual about her—when she’d done sex scenes in movies or romantic scenes in movies, it was like, Wow, what a bombshell . But that’s not who she is—she also seems like she could be a high school teacher, a mom, all those things.

The movie shows a real commitment to investigating these three different communities in this town: the Black community, the Anglo community, and the Tejano community. How did you go about writing these communities? Were you doing research?

I’d touched on these kinds of communities in past projects. I’ve written various stuff, whether it got made or not, about the Brownsville incident . And then I had done stuff about the Mexican community in Texas too. I had hitchhiked down there and talked to local people.

And when we go to a place to shoot, I take the script and give it to some local people and say, “Is there anything that just wouldn’t happen here?” And you get some great stuff back. Some of it is just like, “Well, you can’t catch catfish in that season.” And then some of it is “I don’t think the guy would say that, because he would be sensitive about this local thing.” That’s one reason you try to shoot in the place, instead of just going to Toronto.

The movie moves between past and present with these complex pans in which a scene set in the past ends, and then we pan over and we’re back in the present. What was it like making those shots happen? It seems like a fun filmmaking challenge.

You have to tell your crew, “We’re going to do a complicated shot here, and I am committing to this shot. I’m not going to shoot any coverage.” And once they know that, all that work becomes fun because they know: Oh, we’re not going to go to the movie and find out that actually he cut away to the dog . Everybody gets into the act. The art department, as we’re panning, people are going to be changing clothes. They’re going to be pasting stuff on the wall to make it look like time has passed. We’re going to be easing the light down.

In one shot, Clifton James, who played the mayor, he was a big guy already, and he just said, “I don’t think I can get up out of this chair fast enough to get behind the camera when you need me out of the shot.” And so two grips came and grabbed the arms of his chair and lifted it and him out of the shot.

In a film, a cut is like a border. On this side, it’s one thing; on the other, it’s another. And I didn’t want that separation between the present and the past.

Immigration, both legal and illegal, plays a role in this movie, but it doesn’t overwhelm the story. There’s a lot of other stuff going on in this community. But right now on the Texas-Mexico border, it seems like immigration is, like, the only story. How did you think about that issue when you were making the movie, and how are you thinking about what’s happening at the border now?

I’ve been back there a couple of times, and truly the biggest difference is that there is a wall there now. When we were there, you took a dime and you put it in a slot and you went through a little turnstile and you were in Mexico and you went and had a margarita, and then you came back. People from Mexico did the same thing, and they went to Walmart and bought something, and then they came back in an hour. Not so easy to get across that river now.

Basically, the border is a human construct, and sometimes it becomes physical and sometimes it’s just a symbol. And that symbol has gotten so important politically to certain people who may not give a rat’s ass about whether Mexican people or Central American people come to this country and work for shit wages or not.

Who may even depend on it in some ways.

Yeah, exactly. But I can get some votes by stirring up a lot of fear about people coming in. Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras used to have really good relationships with each other. The mayors of the two towns had good relations with each other. Those became impossible when the federal government came in and started putting up walls. It really pushed those places apart—not only physically, but also psychologically. That’s a lot of weight to put on these little border communities.

What are you working on these days?

I have a novel that will come out about this time next year called To Save the Man , which is set at the Carlisle Indian School in 1890. And we’re trying to make a Western. I haven’t gotten other people’s money to make a movie in 20 years, and unfortunately even to make a small movie now you’re talking about $2 million, which I can’t just take out of my pocket. So we’ve been trying to raise money for movies for years and years and years.

Are you getting closer?

I hope so. You know, most directors don’t retire. They just stop getting financed or they die.

4K UHD Blu-ray/Blu-ray edition reviewed by Chris Galloway
January 30 2024

See more details, packaging, or compare

A keen observer of America’s social fabric, writer-director John Sayles uncovers the haunted past buried beneath a small Texas border town in this sprawling neowestern mystery. When a skeleton is discovered in the desert, lawman Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), son of a legendary local sheriff, begins an investigation that will have profound implications both for him personally and for all of Rio County, a place still reckoning with its history of racial violence. Sayles’s masterful film—novelistic in its intricacy and featuring a brilliant ensemble cast, including Joe Morton, Elizabeth Peña, and Kris Kristofferson—quietly subverts national mythmaking and lays bare the fault lines of life at the border.

Picture 9/10

The Criterion Collection delivers John Sayles’ Lone Star on 4K UHD, presenting the film with Dolby Vision in its original aspect ratio of 2.39:1 on a triple-layer disc. This 2160p/24hz ultra high-definition presentation originates from a new 4K restoration sourced from a scan of the 35mm original camera negative. Additionally, the release includes a standard dual-layer Blu-ray with a 1080p presentation of the film and all special features.

Having not seen the film for a long while (I owned it on VHS and never upgraded to the barebones DVD), watching it through this new 4K presentation felt like a fresh experience. The meticulous restoration work has effectively cleaned up the film, leaving no significant marks or scratches. Colors, leaning warmer to complement the warmer southwest setting, never veer aggressively into yellow tones, allowing whites to look white (though warm) and blues and reds to pop gorgeously.

Dolby Vision and HDR contribute to enhancing colors, blacks, and shadows. Light seamlessly blends into darker areas, and smokey interiors are distinctly rendered with superb delineation. The black levels are rich and deep, allowing for detailed visibility within the shadows. Highlights look superb, reflecting off various surfaces without suffering from macroblocking, a potential issue in some recent Criterion releases. The overall encode is remarkably clean, showcasing grain nicely. While a few shots may appear slightly soft around the edges, the image remains sharp and crisp, offering a wonderful film-like aesthetic thanks to the clean rendering of the grain.

All in, this presentation stands out as one of Criterion’s more impressive offerings as of late, presenting Lone Star in about as superb a manner as possible.

Criterion includes the film's original 2.0 surround soundtrack in DTS-HD MA. Despite the film being more reflective and dialogue-driven, the soundtrack demonstrates unexpected activity. The music, characterized by dynamic shifts and a wide range between lows and highs, stands out. Gunshots, delivered at elevated volume levels, add a shocking element. The surround channels effectively disperse musical elements within the sound field while also enhancing background effects in busy settings, such as the central bar in the film. Dialogue remains sharp, crisp, and easily audible, with no noticeable damage. Overall, the audio is impressive, delivering a surprisingly satisfying experience.

Extras 5/10

While the film may not have achieved commercial success initially, it garnered significant acclaim upon its release and remains highly regarded today. It also still has (unfortunately) a timely relevance. Despite this, there is a lack of substantial supplemental content to this release. Criterion has at least recorded two new interviews, which are found on the included Blu-ray (there are no features on the UHD). The first, a 38-minute conversation between John Sayles and Gregory Nava ( El norte ), initially delves into Sayles’ background and the rise of indie filmmaking in the late 80s/early 90s, before shifting focus to Lone Star . The discussion explores various social themes within the film, touching on class and race hierarchy and the representation and "remembrance" of history. The interview also highlights the film's characters' inclination to reshape history, particularly through the main character's desire to find evidence that his father was a monster.

The discussion then navigates toward casting, noting the impressive ensemble, which includes a pre-stardom Matthew McConaughey and an against-type Kris Kristofferson, the latter being one of my favorite casting choices from the 90s. Technical details, such as the unique transition to flashbacks, are examined. While a director's commentary would have been appreciated, the interview compensates with its engaging and insightful content.

The second interview is with Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh , who contributes insights on filming his first American production, expressing excitement about the "exotic" southwest landscape and his eagerness to work with Sayles. Delving into the film's look and technical aspects, including lighting and in-camera editing (like those flashback transitions), the interview proves informative and engaging.

However, despite the quality of these interviews, the absence of an academic addition or a new cast interview is surprising. The essay by Domino Renee Perez partially fills the academic void, discussing the film's narrative structure and its examination of race and history, even tying the film to current events, including the uproar around the book Forget the Alamo (which was of course also a line from the film). While intriguing, including a video essay or similar material could have further enriched the features.

When all is said and done, this release represents a significant improvement over Warner's no-frills DVD. Yet, the lack of comprehensive content feels remarkably anticlimactic for a film of this considerable stature (and one that has been requested for so long).

The supplements are fine but incredibly underwhelming. Thankfully, the new 4K presentation looks fantastic.

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

A great movie is a rare find among the escapist cheese balls of summer. Lone Star is 134 minutes long, but writer and director John Sayles — whose no-bull credo has held from 1980’s Return of the Secaucus 7 to last year’s The Secret of Roan Inish — makes every hotblooded and hypootic minute count. The place is the border town of Frontera, Texas. The time is 1957, when lawman Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey, headed for star status in the upcoming A Time to Kill ) becomes Frontera’s hero by forcing out the brutal, bigoted Sheriff Charley Wade (a never-better Kris Kristofferson) and taking his job. The time is also the present, when Buddy’s son, Sam (Chris Cooper), is sheriff. After a skeleton is discovered on an Army rifle range, along with Charley’s rusted badge, Sam investigates a case that might prove his late father (idolized by all but Sam) to be a murderer.

Sayles uses the whodunit plot to merge past and present, and to expose Frontera’s social, racial and political hypocrisies. It sounds highfalutin, but Sayles’ knack for edgy humor and ardent sexuality grounds the story in humanism. More than 50 characters people this multicultural tale of a town where the shift of power from Mexicans to Anglos is shifting again.

Hiring onto both sides are the blacks, represented by bar owner Otis Payne (the remarkable Ron Canada), whose estranged son, Delmore (Joe Morton), returns home to command the Army base. This world of children haunted by parents includes Pilar (Elirabeth Pena), a widowed schoolteacher and Sam’s childhood love until her mother, Mercedes (a superb Miriam Colon), broke them up.

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Lone Star (United States, 1996)

In Lone Star , writer/director John Sayles ( City of Hope, Passion Fish ) cannily blends drama, romance, mystery, and social observation into a satisfying, if slightly overlong, whole. In the hands of a lesser film maker, this material could easily have degenerated into routine melodrama, but Sayles keeps it on a consistently high level. While Lone Star is not the director's finest work ( City of Hope is), it's still a very good film with enough material to stimulate energetic post-movie discussion.

Sayles has never made a recognizably "bad" movie, which is impressive considering that he has ten films on his resume. From his early work, which includes Return of the Secaucus Seven (the inspiration for The Big Chill ), Baby, It's You , and Matewan , Sayles has eschewed Hollywood-influenced scripts with cliched plots. The director's more recent films have moved around the globe, embracing a variety of settings, from the steamy bayous of Louisiana ( Passion Fish ) and the shores of Ireland ( The Secret of Roan Inish ) to the Texas/Mexico border ( Lone Star ).

Lone Star opens in the present time frame, and most of the narrative takes place there, with the exception of several, seamlessly-interwoven flashbacks to 1957 and 1973. These are necessary to breathe life into the film's mystery and love stories, and Sayles gives us just enough to satisfy the script's dramatic needs. There isn't one moment during Lone Star when we feel helplessly marooned in the past. Thankfully, there's no voiceover -- the editing is done so expertly that there's never any need.

In 1996, the sheriff of Rio County is Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper). He's been on the job for two years, and he's filling huge footsteps. His late lawman father, Buddy (Matthew McConaughey), is a local legend, and Sam won election more because of his last name than because voters respected his talents. For a variety of reasons, Sam's image of Buddy is far more tarnished than the one endorsed by the community, and, when the corpse of a bigoted ex-sheriff (Kris Kristofferson) is found on an abandoned rifle range, Sam tries his best to pin the forty-year old murder on his father.

Several other stories occur in parallel with Sam's investigation. One involves the sheriff's old flame, Pilar (Elizabeth Pena), trying to explain to concerned parents why she's teaching high school history with a nontraditional slant. Instead of relying on the accepted anglo-approved text, she's attempting to show how "cultures come together in both negative and positive ways." In the meantime, she's wrestling with her feelings for Sam and coping with an unruly teenage son.

We also get to know Colonel Del Payne (Joe Morton), the new commanding officer of Fort McKenzie, which is due to close. Del's father, Otis (Ron Canada), lives in the area. He and his son haven't spoken for decades, but, while Del is bitter about the estrangement, it's impossible for the two men to avoid each other.

As is usually the case in a Sayles film, solid acting complements an intelligent script. Chris Cooper, who was in Matewan and City of Hope , gives a subdued performance as Sam, and it's his low-key acting that allows one of the movie's most difficult scenes (dealing with a delicate and controversial subject) to work. Mixing toughness and vulnerability, Elizabeth Pena carries off her scenes nicely. Kris Kristofferson, despite limited screen time, makes an effective villain. Others, like Joe Morton, Ron Canada, and Frances McDormand (the star of Fargo ), provide solid support.

Lone Star contains a number of "escape hatches" -- points when the story could have moved in a safe, predictable direction, but Sayles uses few of these. The weakest aspect of the movie is the mystery, but it's also the least important. Lone Star is most intimately concerned with how different cultures and generations mix, match, and interact in a place where anglos have the wealth and power although 19 out of every 20 people are Mexican by birth. The black community, populated mainly by soldiers from the fort, is a small-but-important force. Sayles explores the bipolar issues of racial divisiveness and tolerance, both as they exist today and as they were nearly forty years ago, and does so without ever losing sight of the characters. With its numerous strengths and few weaknesses, Lone Star is an example of why Sayles' films are so engrossing despite lengths which consistently exceed two hours.

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Lone Star Review

17 Aug 2016

Almost uniquely among contemporary film makers, John Sayles has never directed a bad film. While most independent director-writers concentrate on refining their narrow fields of interest, essentially making the same film over and over, Sayles is astonishingly eclectic. His body of work is unified only by intelligence and commitment, ranging across genres, moods and scales.

In a terrific opening, a couple of off-duty soldiers fooling around in the desert near the border town of Frontera discover a human skull. Sheriff Sam Deeds (Cooper) is called in and guesses the long-dead man might have been Charlie Wade (Kristofferson), an old-school lawman of the "bullets and bribes" school who disappeared 30 years earlier, after an argument with Sam's dad, Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey). Buddy, Sheriff before his son, is a legendary local whose stature is by no means an unmixed blessing to Sam as he tries to make his way in a changing town.

Also mixed up are Pilar (Pena), a Hispanic history teacher whose teenage romance with Sam was squelched by Buddy, and Mercedes (Miriam Colon), Pilar's powerful restaurant-running mother. Colonel Payne (Joe Morton), C.O. of a soon-to-be-closed army base, has a tie-in through his father Otis (Ron Canada), who runs an off-limits bar. As Sam asks questions and prompts conflicting flashback anecdotes, he comes to understand his own intricate family backstory - which includes a kicker of a last-act revelation - and its relationship with the evolving political and racial situation along the border.

Like the earlier City Of Hope, Lone Star demands the viewer's complete engagement with a huge cast and depends on the gradual release of plot information that makes connections between characters grow as the film progresses. Even one-scene characters are unforgettable, but Sayles really gets under the skin of his struggling-to-be-heroic leads, Sam and Pilar.

IMAGES

Lone Star [1996] Review
Criterion Review: LONE STAR (1996)
Lone Star Review :: Criterion Forum
Lone Star [1996] Review
Review: Lone Star (1996)
Lone Star

VIDEO

LONE STAR (1996)
Lone Star Full Movie Facts & Review In English / Ron Canada / Chris Cooper
Lone Star (1996) Movie Scene || Stunning Kris Kristofferson
Lone Star
Lone Star Criterion 4K Review
Review of: Lone Star (1996). I Would Call This Shakespearean. Just Look At It!

COMMENTS

Lone Star movie review & film summary (1996)
"Lone Star" is a great American movie, one of the few to seriously try to regard with open eyes the way we live now. Set in a town that until very recently was rigidly segregated, it shows how Chicanos, blacks, whites and Indians shared a common history, and how they knew one another and dealt with one another in ways that were off the ...
Forget the Alamo: The Silver Anniversary of Lone Star
Released 25 years ago this week, John Sayles' "Lone Star" is the director's best film and the most wide-ranging and sophisticated drama ever set in Texas. And it is the movie that best understands how Texans mythologize and lie about themselves, and how the lying and mythologizing dovetails with deception and self-deception in the rest of the nation, and the world.
Lone Star
Rated: 4/5 Sep 6, 2023 Full Review Michael J. Casey Boulder Weekly If you haven't seen "Lone Star" before, you'll be gob-smacked a movie this good isn't talked about more.
FILM REVIEW;Sleepy Texas Town With an Epic Story
Indeed, "Lone Star" exists so far outside the province of slam-bang summer movies that it seems part of a different medium and a different world. The place is Frontera, Tex., a sleepy little town ...
Lone Star (1996)
Lone Star: Directed by John Sayles. With Stephen Mendillo, Stephen J. Lang, Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Peña. When the skeleton of his murdered predecessor is found, Sheriff Sam Deeds unearths many other long-buried secrets in his Texas border town.
Lone Star (1996 film)
Lone Star [3] is a 1996 American neo-Western mystery film written, edited, and directed by John Sayles.Set in a small town in South Texas, the film deals with a sheriff's (played by Chris Cooper) investigation into the murder of one of his predecessors (Kris Kristofferson) decades earlier.The cast also stars Joe Morton, Elizabeth Peña, Clifton James, Ron Canada, Frances McDormand and Matthew ...
Lone Star [1996] Review
If there is one quintessential movie which elegantly and broadly intertwined Sayles' themes and ideas, then it must be his novelistic multi-generation and multi-ethnic tale titled Lone Star (1996). Set in the Texas border town of Frontera, Lone Star is a complex and ultimately rewarding tale of fractured relationships in an incredibly diverse ...
Why John Sayles' quietly compelling 'Lone Star' is well worth
"Lone Star," celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, is Seattle Times movie critic Moira Macdonald's favorite John Sayles film. It's both murder mystery and tense portrait of a small Texas...
Lone Star Reviews
Lone Star is so poetic and cinematic that even its setting reveals more of the film's thematic elements and really plays into what the film is attempting to communicate. Overall, Lone Star is far more than a crime film. Instead, it is a brilliantly poetic and moving examination of life, the past, and the future.
Lone Star (1996)
17 Best Streaming services for foreign-language movies; 6 Best Streaming Services with Dolby Atmos; 8 Best Services to Get an ESPN Free Trial ... DIRECTV Stream Review for 2024; Fubo Plans and Pricing 2024 - Everything You Need To Know ... Lone Star pulls off all the gravity and sweep of an epic thanks to its seemingly-micro-actually-macro ...
Lone Star (1996)
A keen observer of America's social fabric, writer-director John Sayles uncovers the haunted past buried beneath a small Texas border town in this sprawling neowestern mystery. When a skeleton is discovered in the desert, lawman Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), son of a legendary local sheriff, begins an investigation that will have profound implications both for him personally and for all of Rio ...
Lone Star (1996)
John Sayles is regarded as one of the best independent film-makers about and Lone Star is a film of a man in full throttle. Its a set of interwoven stories set in two time periods as Chris Cooper a border town sheriff who has returned to his home town where his father was a legendary Sheriff investigates a 40 year old murder that may have been committed by his own father.
Lone Star 1996, directed by John Sayles
A skeleton's discovered in the desert just outside the Tex-Mex bordertown of Frontera, and sheriff Sam Deeds (Cooper) soon concludes that the dead man - 'bribes 'n' bullets' lawman Charlie Wade ...
Lone Star
Lone Star is a crisp, original work that is equally intriguing as a mystery, a romance, and a tale of a town's history. As the border town is a microcosm of America, you could say most of us will ...
Lone Star movie: The great Western that helped make Matthew McConaughey
Movies The '90s Matthew McConaughey Western That Showed the Border Before the Wall Writer-director John Sayles on what's changed—and what hasn't—since Lone Star.
Lone Star Review
Picture 9/10. The Criterion Collection delivers John Sayles' Lone Star on 4K UHD, presenting the film with Dolby Vision in its original aspect ratio of 2.39:1 on a triple-layer disc. This 2160p/24hz ultra high-definition presentation originates from a new 4K restoration sourced from a scan of the 35mm original camera negative.
Lone Star
A great movie is a rare find among the escapist cheese balls of summer. Lone Star is 134 minutes long, but writer and director John Sayles — whose no-bull credo has held from 1980's Return of ...
'Lone Star' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: The Criterion Collection
A more holistic definition, though, might be one that highlights how the elements that make up a movie operate in such perfect harmony that they seem to flow from the same pen. On those terms, John Sayles's Lone Star is among the most literary films ever made. Ostensibly a murder mystery set in a Texas border town, the 1996 neo-western ...
Lone Star
In Lone Star, writer/director John Sayles (City of Hope, Passion Fish) cannily blends drama, romance, mystery, and social observation into a satisfying, if slightly overlong, whole.In the hands of a lesser film maker, this material could easily have degenerated into routine melodrama, but Sayles keeps it on a consistently high level.
Lone Star Review
Like the earlier City Of Hope, Lone Star demands the viewer's complete engagement with a huge cast and depends on the gradual release of plot information that makes connections between characters ...