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.
The rumour (which can hardly be spoken aloud) is that Wade was actually shot and secretly buried there by Buddy himself, played in flashback scenes by Matthew McConaughey. There was another beta-male sycophant officer hanging around: Hollis, phlegmatically played in the present day by Clifton James. But when Sam goes around asking questions about this skeleton and its rusted badge, the entire community stirs, as if roused from an uneasy sleep.
Sam himself is divorced – Frances McDormand has a great cameo as his unhappy, hyperactive, football-crazy ex-wife – and he has moved back here to his home town because he has never forgotten his Mexican high school sweetheart Pilar, now a history teacher played by Elizabeth Peña; her job is complicated now that she must debate with angry parents the way in which she teaches Tex-Mex issues. Meanwhile, Pilar’s demanding mother Mercedes (Míriam Colón) runs a restaurant, which, like many other such establishments, provides employment for illegal migrants and which institutionalises the ongoing crisis of loyalty. African Americans, the third ethnic presence after Anglos and Mexicans, are represented in a bar run by Otis Payne (Ron Canada), whose estranged son Delmore (Joe Morton) is an ambitiously careerist army officer.
These people form a constellation of stories and focal points of suppressed emotion and pain from which Cooper’s Sam emerges as the central figure, going through a kind of midlife crisis as he remembers how cruelly his father broke up his relationship with Pilar when they were kids. Sayles also brings off a particular kind of memory-flashback approach for Sam and Pilar, moving the camera in unbroken physical space from the thoughtful middle-aged Sam to the actor playing the kid that he was: a theatrical technique emphasising that all these events happened in the same place, and not that long ago.
The emerging truth is that the horror that once greeted intermarrying, a bigotry that governed life in decades past, is receding. Perhaps the tribal distinctions with which everyone has grown up – and which in people’s minds constitute the notion of “history” itself – will blur and vanish. A really absorbing and powerfully acted drama, guided with a distinctive kind of Zen wisdom by Sayles.
• Lone Star is in UK cinemas from 16 August.
