This rerelease of John Sayles’s western crime drama from 1996 is a reminder that he offered a vital but now maybe overlooked strand of indie movie-making and myth-making in 90s Hollywood, distinct from the brilliant ironies and shocks of Tarantino or the literary noir of the Coen brothers. Lone 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, a movie about the old west and the new west and about the culture wars of Texas and Mexico, about the melancholy spectacle of old white guys in Stetsons having coffee together, about who owns the narrative and who prints the legend. And it’s a film about the Freudian fear of the father and the embrace of taboo, with an extraordinary and very subversive ending.
The setting is the (fictional) little town of Frontera, Texas, attractive to a certain kind of visitor for being close to the border and a world of cheap bought sex in Mexico. In the grim words of Sheriff Sam Deeds, played by Sayles’s repertory regular Chris Cooper, the town should have a tourist slogan: “gateway to inexpensive pussy”. Sam should be in a good mood because the local courthouse is being named after his late father, Buddy, once himself the town’s sheriff, but Sam is subdued because a couple of treasure-hunt enthusiasts with a metal detector have dug up a skeleton with a “lone star” badge in some rough scrubland nearby. It is apparently what remains of a notoriously racist and corrupt law enforcement officer from even longer ago called Charlie Wade, played in flashback by Kris Kristofferson. Continue reading...
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