Lone Star

John Sayles' best film: amazing, epic story; beautifully told in elegant flashbacks, featuring Chris Cooper in one of his best roles. A film of stunning beauty and humanity - and also very entertaining. 9 stars out of 10. In case you're interested in more underrated masterpieces, here's some of my favorites: imdb.com/list/ls070242495

... if ever there was one. Several trails, with their tails buried deep in the past and a few more recent, esoterically intertwined, slightly kinked and irregular, a little disturbing to boot. But that pretty much sums up what life really is, especially where many paths cross and are concentrated, amplified, with cultural differences, racial tensions, frictions.

Contains spoilers * * * * * Why does everyone think this guy is such a genius? Every time I see one of his long, dull, politically correct movies with characters who say things that they would only say in a Sayles movie, I want to spit. Even the reviewers simply stampede each other to acclaim his latest work a "masterpiece" and you know what, nobody goes to see it! You know why? Because this kind of fake "reality" movie where the screenwriter is in love with the sound of his own dialogue is absolutely bogus. A sheriff who only came back to town to see his sweety once again, and spends two years shuffling his boots before he talks to her? A 1950s sheriff who is as corrupt as a gangster, shoots people in the back by the dozens, and is never reported to any higher authority? Half-brother/half-sister incest thrown in at the end because the murder mystery is so dreary. Characters who do, say, talk, as if they live nowhere but in the writer's mind and are endlessly clever while ruthlessly hueing to the political sentiment of the time. Sayles movies don't have characters: they have trite ideas dressed up as characters whose only purpose is to bludgeon us with Sayles' viewpoint on everything. It's like listening to a cokehead ramble o n about the war on drugs: you already know what his opinion is going to be, and you can't get him to shut up after he's given it to you. I can understand why Sayle's doesn't "sell out" and go Hollywood. Hollywood isn't interested in selling tickets to the same ten thousand critics and Sayles fanclub members year after year. Because those are the only people who pay to see the same needlessly convoluted and psuedo-historical malarkey this guy keeps putting out year after years. Lone Star is artificial, stilted, and about as much fun to sit through as a 2-hour lecture on social equality, which is exactly what this movie is.

Dear Roger Ebert, I am surprised you recommended Lone Star as one of the best films of 1996. I don't see why some of the reviewers are raving about the film. It did deal with some interesting themes like race relations in a multi-cultural town, patriotism, American history as a battleground between races and how the characters are all prisoners of their shared history. While the film is known as a murder mystery, it is more like a study of race relations in the backdrop of the murder mystery. The sub plots and the characters receive as much space as the murder mystery. But the sub plots were quite unimaginative. There were too many characters, most of whom were uninteresting. I also cannot say much about Josh Sayles style. The truth is that he lacks any sort of visual style. I guess he is a filmmaker with something to say about the state of his country and not someone who simply makes genre films. But it really did not work for me. I found the whole film to be quite dull and the performances to be mostly uninspired. Best Regards, Pimpin. (5/10)

John Sayles wrote the original screenplay for, and directed, "Lone Star." If his script fails to portray the development and intersection of ethnic relations, marital relations, migration, cultural assimilation, politics, education, big business, and even the army in the southern and western United States, from the Treaty of Payne's Landing and eviction of the Seminoles from Florida in 1832 to the cross-border migration of Mexicans to south Texas in the 1990's, it's not for lack of trying. The sweep of his screenplay aspires to be nothing less than multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-class, multi-marriage -- in a word, epic. . . . Alas, the script does ultimately fail. It fails because the screenwriter spends too much time having characters lecture each other for the benefit of the audience and too little time creating dramatic incidents through which the audience might see important issues articulated, developed, and resolved. As Laura Miller puts it in her Salon review, "The independent filmmaker John Sayles reminds me of Gertrude Stein's description of Ezra Pound: 'He is a village explainer. All very well if you happen to be a village. If not, not.'" More simply, Sayles is not Chekhov, and his movie is not "The Ox-Bow Incident" or "To Kill a Mockingbird." . . . The acting, or perhaps it is the direction of the acting, is a problem here too. Character actor Chris Cooper plays a rural sheriff faced with two cold cases -- a 40-year-old homicide and a father he never knew -- with such lack of affect that you want to kick some life into the guy. (I saw him as Sheriff Deeds, all right, but kept hearing the same dull voice he would later bring to FBI operative Robert Hanssen in "Breach.") Comely Elizabeth Peña plays his romantic interest with a ground-down-by-life monotone and an accent that sounds more South Bronx than South Texas. Miriam Colon, as Peña's restaurateur mother, is given almost nothing but acerbic, if not hateful, lines to deliver. Even the wonderful Frances McDormand, who received the Academy Award for her role in "Fargo" the same year that "Lone Star" came out, is over-the-top in a comic turn as Sheriff Deeds' ex-wife Bunny. Only Kris Kristofferson, as the heavy Charlie Wade, and Joe Morton, as an Army colonel who's all spit, vinegar, and heart, are consistently fun to watch. . . . One final cavil: the plot, such as it is, moves forward through luck and happenstance, not through the logic of real life.

Good example of a film that introduces too many characters and then expects the bewildered audience to figure out what's happening. You shouldn't have to think so much as to what's going on. This is supposed to be entertainment, however I found "Lone Star" to be exhausting, rather than interesting. Flashbacks only add to the tepid pacing. The conclusion is both frustrating and somewhat of a letdown. The acting is fine, especially Chris Cooper, with less going on, probably the movie would have benefited. I realize Sayles has cult status, but here he has failed to impress. My conclusion is that this is definitely not worth sitting through, only to be disappointed. - MERK

"Lone Star" opens with the discovery of skeletal remains, and the calling in of local sheriff Sam Deeds (played by Chris Cooper.) The opening leads you to believe that you're in for a murder mystery focusing around the investigation into the identity of both the victim and the killer. Instead, the investigation (such as it is, and it's pretty weakly portrayed) definitely fades into the background, with the movie instead focusing on the tension between the white, latino and black communities in this small town on the Texas-Mexico border, on the tensions within those communities and on the tensions between families within the communities. Parent-child relationships are definitely strained. The focus is on the relationship between current sheriff Deeds and his father, a former legendary sheriff in the same town (played in flashbacks by Matthew McConaghey), but there are other families portrayed as well - frankly too many, especially given that I didn't find many of the family issues all that interesting. In fact, I thought the whole movie was rather dry. For all the tensions portrayed (that I mentioned above) nothing really dramatic happens because of them. It's kind of like watching a movie about your next door neighbours. They're nice folks, but do you need two and a half hours about them? I give director John Sayles credit for the seamless way he worked the flashbacks into the main story, and the resolution of the mystery around the killer came as a bit of a surprise to me. I can't, however, say that I found any of this riveting. 3/10

An entrancing yarn that takes place in a small, quiet Texas border town where the memories of two former lawmen, the crooked Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson) and the legendary Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey) are slowly resurrected when the remains of Wade are found on an deserted Army firing range by Deeds' son, Sam (Chris Cooper), who is the current town sheriff. Throughout the movie, Sam visits some of the locals and asks each one if they knew what happened to Wade and if Buddy had a role in the murder. Writer-director-editor John Sayles serves up an unpredictable gem here with a great cast that includes Joe Morton, Elisabeth Pena, Frances McDormand, etc., and to me, it seems like nearly all the characters here make sense right up to the end.

John Sayles is not only a great director, but he is also a truly great writer, and "Lone Star" is simply one of the best-written films of all time. Out of the 30+ scripts I studied in script analysis classes, this was, other than "Manhattan", the most interesting, involving, evocative screenplay I read during that period, and probably the one with the most depth. I saw the film a few months after reading its screenplay, and found that it far surpassed the mental image I had in my head of the film. "Lone Star" could have been a standard mystery. It could have been a 'modern Western', or it could have been a superficial race drama, but it is none of those things (at least not exclusively), it is a fascinating, subtle look at race relations in Texas, as well as at basic human nature. Unlike the contrived writing one would find in an 'Oscar bait' drama film, Sayles' interwoven plots don't feel forced simply because he sets them up so well. The depth and scale of the writing here is remarkable, especially because the film, with all its subplots and characters, never feels cluttered or unnatural. This is a character study of the highest order, and there's no point in discussing the actual events of the film further because this is a film that is best seen (or, indeed, read) with fresh eyes, and I'd hate to spoil that for readers who haven't seen the film. It's a sad fact of life that directors like Sayles, who see films as stories that must be told, and direct them well, but without intrusive and obvious stylistic quirks, are less noticed than directors who practically beg for attention. That's not to say that this film is not well-made, because anyone with any sort of experience with technical details of cinema could tell you that it is a very well-shot and very well-edited film with excellent use of music. That said, this film is ultimately about the writing, and the acting, and both are absolutely superb, the standout from the latter category being Chris Cooper, who gives what is probably one of the nineties' best performances in this film. 10/10

This is a typical John Sayles movie in that it has overt Liberal agendas but, unlike most of his films, is mostly boring. This starts off as a forensic story (before CSI popularized that topic) about trying to find out who killed someone years after their skeletal remains were found. The story, however, quickly veers into Sayles' more familiar territory: political correctness and preaching more about racial tolerance, more on that than on the crime story. As a result, the story bogs down quickly, and never really recovers. Sayles is like many liberal filmmakers, soothes his conscience, apparently, by spewing his left wing diatribes over and over such as always showing white people and-or law enforcement as hateful racists. Right-wing politicos are always been evil, and all minorities innocent victims (rarely, if ever, perpetrators) from these hate-filled Caucasians. You get a lot of "diversity" here and it winds up being more soap opera than crime. In this film, we get a good mix of white, black and Hispanic as the story takes place in border town in Texas. Another key element of the story is dysfunctional families, another favorite topic of today's filmmakers. They must speak from experience. Here, the sheriff thinks his father - also a sheriff - might have been a murderer. Those who love small-town corruption stories, where everyone has a million skeletons in their closet, should like this cultural crime soaper. The cover of the DVD or VHS make may this film sound like it's a crime story but don't be fooled: it's pure soap. It is a slow two and a quarter hours of political correctness gone amok. "Nuff said.