When an old skeleton with a sheriff’s badge is unearthed in a Texas border town, Sheriff Sam Deeds must investigate what could have happened to his predecessor. Examining racial violence, local legends, and myths around his own family, he ends up disturbing many long-buried secrets in the process. Academy Award®-nominated for Best Screenplay, Lone Star is a thrilling neo-Western mystery, with scene-stealing turns from a young Matthew McConaughey and Frances McDormand. This stunning 4K restoration was supervised by director John Sayles and director of photography Stuart Dryburgh, and created from the 35mm original camera negative.
SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
The final words of Lone Star are ‘Forget the Alamo’. In a border region which, as the protagonist Sam Deeds remarks with laconic understatement, ‘has seen a good number of disagreements over the years’, the past weighs heavy, constraining and distorting relationships not only between individuals but between generations and whole communities. Pilar Cruz’s words, ‘All that stuff, that history – the hell with it, right?’, are a bid to break free from the trap of past guilts and enmities and start from scratch. The film, the director John Sayles has said, is ‘about history and what we do with it. Do we use it to hit each other? Is it something that drags us down? … At what point do you say about your parents, “That was them, this is me”?’
At the same time, that ‘Forget the Alamo’ – which Sayles at one point considered as a title for the film – shouldn’t be taken too literally. Neither Pilar (a history teacher, after all) nor Sayles is suggesting anything so crude as simply junking the past, even if any of us could. Sayles’s latest film develops the theme that has underpinned all his work to date: the sense of character as a product of accumulated social and cultural influences, the way people are moulded by their backgrounds and their pasts but can surmount that conditioning if they try hard enough. ‘Blood only means what you let it,’ Otis Payne tells his grandson, even while teaching him to be proud of his mixed Afro-Seminole ancestry. ‘Most people,’ says Cody, the redneck barman, ‘don’t want their salt and sugar in the same jar,’ but under his morose gaze two army sergeants, one Black and one white, are showing up the inadequacy of his metaphor as they plan their future life together.
After two relatively intimate chamber works – Passion Fish and The Secret of Roan Inish – Lone Star sees Sayles returning to the broad-canvas, multiple-character mode of Matewan and City of Hope. The new film, indeed, comes on very much as a companion piece to City of Hope – one northern and urban, the other southern and smalltown-rural, but both intent on tracing lines of tension and interconnection among a wide spread of individuals, showing how they impinge on each other no matter how much they try to hold themselves separate. Several characters in Lone Star strive to keep aloof: Mercedes Cruz, proud of her American citizenship, rejecting her own Hispanic background; Delmore Payne taking refuge in the rigid disciplines of army life; the Anglo parents at the school, resentful at finding themselves a minority in ‘their’ community. For Lone Star is both a film about connections and also, in Sayles’s words, ‘a film about borders’ – which, however artificial, are there and have to be acknowledged, but can still be crossed. In the final scene Sam and Pilar deliberately decide to cross one of the most fundamental borders of all, the incest taboo, since it matters less than their own happiness.
In its visual style, too, the film elides borders. Flashbacks are presented, not by cuts or dissolves, but by the camera simply panning left or right, up or down into a different time-zone that nonetheless occupies part of the same space. The past, Sayles is indicating, isn’t another country; it’s still here and people like Sam are living in it, carrying it with them. And as the flashbacks accumulate, the line between moral absolutes also starts to blur. To begin with Charlie Wade and Buddy Deeds are seen as polar opposites: bad guy and good guy, ‘your ol’ time bribe and bullets sheriff’ (in Mayor Hollis Pogue’s phrase) versus the paragon of civic integrity. (The name carries its resonance; the principled hero of Frank Capra’s Mr Deeds Goes to Town was played by that iconic figure of the Old West, Gary Cooper.) But as Sam digs away around the feet of the idol, determined to expose the clay, a less clearcut, more human figure emerges: a man less bad than Sam wants him to be, but less perfect than the legend paints him. ‘It’s not like there’s a borderline between the good people and the bad people,’ Otis observes.
As that line indicates, Lone Star now and then tends to the overly didactic, and some of the plotting (such as the revelation that Mercedes Cruz was an illegal) comes a little too pat to carry conviction. In aspiring to a near-novelistic complexity of texture, Sayles overeggs his pudding: there are half-a-dozen more minor plot strands than the above synopsis indicates, and some of them could be axed without doing the film much damage. But Lone Star, while breaking new ground in Sayles’ ongoing exploration of the American myth, retains all his qualities of intelligence, political acuteness and narrative lucidity, and its widescreen photography (by Stuart Dryburgh, who photographed The Piano) develops the strain of visual lyricism that’s enriched his films since Matewan. As ever, he draws nuanced performances from his cast, blending rep company regulars like Chris Cooper (Matewan, City of Hope) with newcomers like Frances McDormand (a cameo of knife-edge hysteria as Sam’s estranged wife), and gives Kris Kristofferson his first worthwhile role for a decade.
John Sayles has always taken a fruitfully oblique angle on genre, and Lone Star turns the conventions and vocabulary of the Western to its own ends. The central strand of a man gradually stripping the legend away from an admired father-figure carries echoes of Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem (to say nothing of Citizen Kane). But, although Sayles has often said he wants his films to make people think about their own lives, not about other films, Lone Star’s final revelation comes so close to the denouement of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that it can only be intentional. The whole film, in fact, could be read as a covert critique of John Ford’s film, and even provides its own ironic version of Valance’s most famous line when Hollis protests that suppressing the truth will leave people thinking Buddy killed Wade: ‘Buddy’s a goddamn legend – he can handle it.’ It says a lot for Sayles’s achievement that his film isn’t in the least diminished by the comparison.
Philip Kemp, Sight and Sound, October 1996
LONE STAR
Director: John Sayles
Production Companies: Castle Rock Entertainment, Rio Dulce
Executive Producer: John Sloss
Producers: R. Paul Miller, Maggie Renzi
Associate Producer: Jan Foster
Production Manager: Robert Labrecque
Production Co-ordinator: Angela Quiles
Location Manager: Deborah Parker
Post-production Supervisor: Caitlin Maloney
1st Assistant Director: John Powditch
2nd Assistant Director: Brian O’Kelley
2nd 2nd Assistant Director: Galia Hardy
Script Supervisor: Mary Cybulski
Casting: Avy Kaufman
Screenplay: John Sayles
Director of Photography: Stuart Dryburgh
Steadicam Operators: David McGill, Ralph Watson
Special Effects Co-ordinator: Jack Bennett
Editor: John Sayles
Associate Editor: Plummy Tucker
Production Designer: Dan Bishop
Art Director: Kyler Black
Set Decorator: Dianna Freas
Costume Designer: Shay Cunliffe
Wardrobe Supervisor: Mayes Rubeo
Key Make-up Artist: Lori Hicks
Key Hairstylist: Roy Bryson
Hairstylists: Caroline Rempher, Susan Todd
Titles Designed/Produced by: Balsmeyer & Everett Inc
Opticals: The Effects House
Music: Mason Daring
Score Performers: Duke Levine, Billy Novick, Marshal Wood, Tim Jackson, Larry Luddecke, Mike Turk, Evan Harlan, Mason Daring
Music Editor: Nic Ratner
Music Score Engineered/Mixed by: David Shacter
Music Consultant: Arlene Fishbach
Sound Mixer: Clive Winter
Re-recording Engineer: Michael Barry
Supervising Sound Editor: Philip Stockton
Dialogue Editor: Sylvia Menno
Effects Recordist: Ben Cheah
Effects Editors: Eugene Gearty, Lew Goldstein
ADR Editor: Gail Stockton
Foley Recordist: Bruce Pross
Foley Artist: Marko Costanzo
Foley Editors: Steve Visscher, Frank Kern, Kam Chan, Stuart Stanley
Military Adviser: Lt. Col. Mitch Marovitz
Cast
Chris Cooper (Sam Deeds)
Elizabeth Peña (Pilar Cruz)
Joe Morton (Delmore ‘Del’ Payne)
Matthew McConaughey (Buddy Deeds)
Kris Kristofferson (Charlie Wade)
Stephen Mendillo (Cliff)
Stephen Lang (Mikey)
Oni Faida Lampley (Celie)
Eleese Lester (Molly)
Joe Stevens (Deputy Travis)
Gonzalo Castillo (Amado)
Richard Coca (Enrique)
Clifton James (Mayor Hollis Pogue)
Tony Frank (Fenton)
Miriam Colón (Mercedes Cruz)
Jeff Monahan (young Hollis)
LaTanya Richardson (Priscilla Worth)
Eddie Robinson (Chet)
Ron Canada (Otis Payne)
Chandra Wilson (Athens)
Damon Guy (Shadow)
Dee Macaluso (Anglo mother)
Luis Cobo (Mexican-American father)
Marco Perella (Anglo father)
Don Phillips (principal)
Mary Jane R. Hernandez (Mexican-American mother)
Jesse Borrego (Danny)
Carina Martinez (Paloma)
Tony Plana (Ray)
Richard A. Jones (Ben Wetzel)
Beatrice Winde (Minnie Bledsoe)
Gabriel Casseus (young Otis)
Randy Stripling (Roderick)
Richard Reyes (Jorge)
Olga Luna (waitress)
Juan Vega III (cook)
Lizzie Curry Martínez (girl)
Leo Burmester (Cody)
Carmen de Lavallade (Carolyn)
Vanessa Martinez (young Pilar)
Tay Strathairn (young Sam)
Sam Vlahos (Pete)
Maricela Gonzalez (Anselma)
Tony Amendola (Chucho Montoya)
Gilbert R. Cuellar Jr. (Eladio)
James Borrego (young Chucho)
Gordon Tootoosis (Wesley Birdsong)
Lisa Suarez (Marisol)
Jesús Ramirez (driver)
Frances McDormand (Bunny)
John Griesemer (voice of football announcer)
Eduardo Martinez (Jamie)
Azalea Mendez (young Mercedes)
USA 1996
135 mins
Digital 4K
A Park Circus release
The screenings on Sat 17 Aug 17:50 and Sun 18 Aug 12:50 include a pre-recorded intro by director John Sayles and producer Maggie Renzi
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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