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Lone Star 4K

by Glenn Erickson Jan 20, 2024
Texas becomes a battleground for change: the law ‘n’ order image of the Texas Rangers, the attitudes of established immigrants, a soldier trying to instill older values and a teacher trying to inspire new ones. How do we deal with the controversial past, public and private? Director John Sayles’ vivid screenplay benefits from excellent performances by Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Peña, Kris Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey, Miriam Colon, Joe Morton, Clifton James, Ron Canada — the list goes on. Sayles’ most satisfying drama puts the conflicts of the cultural divide in clear terms. History plays ironic tricks on all of the characters, no preference given.

 


Lone Star 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1202
1996 / Color / 2:39 widescreen / 135 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date January 16, 2024 / 39.95
Starring: Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Peña, Kris Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey, Miriam Colon, Joe Morton, Clifton James, Ron Canada, Chandra Wilson, Carmen De Lavallade, .
Cinematography: Stuart Dryburgh
Production Designer: Dan Bishop
Art Director: Kyler Black
Film Editor: John Sayles
Costume Design: Shay Cunliffe
Original Music: Mason Daring
Produced by Maggie Renzi, R. Paul Miller
Written and Directed by
John Sayles

This is one superior movie, a winner that plays extremely well with audiences. The great independent John Sayles never made a movie he didn’t believe in. His masterpiece Matewan recreated a labor crisis from the 1920s. His even more ambitious Lone Star earned Sayles his second Academy nomination for Best Screenplay. It uses a murder mystery framework to examine small-town corruption, and finishes with a positive humanist statement.

Initially praised for his early genre screenplays (Go werewolves!) and launched as a favored indie writer-director with The Return of the Secaucus Seven, John Sayles never courted big studio money. He instead pursued a variety of subjects, about which he always had something interesting to say —  LGBT life,  baseball,  adoption tourism,  commonplace terror in the Third World. We’d attend Cinematheque previews and stick around to hear Mr. Sayles’ friendly post-screening discussions. Too many of his pictures are now difficult to see, like  City of Hope and  The Brother from Another Planet.  We’re hoping that Criterion will continue tapping Sayles’ rich vein of truly independent features.

Every bit a masterpiece as his Eight Men Out and Matewan, Lone Star turns a thoughtful lens to the modern western landscape, a hundred years after the closing of the frontier. The dark past hasn’t gone away, and some Texans that fear a demographic shift away from white dominance. What happens when a secret emerges that might upset the apple cart down at City Hall?  Instead of preaching, Lone Star celebrates the fact that people still exist That Care About The Truth.

 

“Word gets out, and people are gonna think Buddy done it.”

The discovery of skeletal remains outside of Frontera, Texas, leads Rio County Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) to reopen some old wounds — especially as concerns his own father, the esteemed Sheriff Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey    ). 40 years ago Buddy was a deputy for the corrupt Sheriff Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson), who shook down selected businesses and killed under cover of the authority of his badge. Sam unearths old secrets involving Mayor Pogue (Clifton James of Live and Let Die), restaurant owner Mercedes Cruz (Miriam Colon) and barman Otis ‘Big O’ Payne (Ron Canada). His poking about shows old prejudices struggling in a changing Texas. Otis’s son Colonel Delmore Payne (Joe Morton of The Brother from Another Planet) has just taken command at the local army base slated for closing. Del is having discipline problems with his younger soldiers, that he feels are insufficiently motivated.

Sam discovers that the teenager Amado (Gonzalo Castillo) arrested by his deputy Ray (Tony Plana) is the son of Mercedes Cruz’s daughter Pilar (Elizabeth Peña) — who Sam was forbidden to date back in his own teenage days. Schoolteacher Pilar is now a widow. Sam seeks her advice on how to handle an investigation that might reveal unpleasant things about their parents’ generation. The Mayor is putting up a special plaque to commemorate the respected Buddy Deeds. But did Deeds Senior murder Charlie Wade?  What really happened to a large chunk of money that Wade allegedly stole from the county coffers?

Lone Star contains numerous surprises that shouldn’t be spoiled. And they aren’t cheap plot twists, either. The audience at our screening back in 1997, at an ordinary multiplex, audibly drew their breath at least twice.

 

Who killed Eladio Cruz?  Who killed Charlie Wade?

Sheriff Charlie Wade terrorized the whole community. He killed Mexican-Americans with impunity. The only man who stood up to him was Buddy Deeds, who local gossip theorizes shot Wade dead and made his body disappear.

Intent on clearing up those rumors, Sam Deeds discovers that his father wasn’t as ethical as he thought . . . but hardly anybody was. Other ‘good’ characters dabbled in smuggling and illegal gambling. Buddy didn’t take the cash bribes other deputies took, but he later joined in some shady development deals.

John Sayles asks if ‘telling the truth’ about the corrupt past is always the best policy. What if the truth will do more harm than good?  Lone Star opposes the whole premise of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  Democracy might have a better chance if the culture stopped perpetuating lies with the excuse that they’re ‘Printing the Legend.’

Also as in Liberty Valance, the ‘doer of a legendary deed’ remains anonymous. In this case it’s not a heroic character at all, but someone who’ll never be commemorated with a statue in the town square.

 

“Sheriff Deeds is dead, honey. You just Sheriff Junior.”

Actor Chris Cooper exudes some of the integrity of golden-era western heroes, while confronting contemporary moral and ethical confusion. Is everyone living a lie?  To research his dad, Sam visits various witnesses to the past. He hears some good stories, but suspects that not everyone is telling the truth. More than one interviewee drops hints about letting sleeping dogs lie.

The flashback scenes give us ‘young’ versions of Otis and Hollis (Gabriel Casseus & Jeff Monahan). John Sayles’ cleverly designed flashback transitions felt very fresh in 1996, but after 28 years of similar techniques, they may no longer impress. The present-day Otis and Hollis are very much affected by secrets hidden for 40 years.

This is the first film we remember with the now- major star Mathew McConaughey. It is also also our favorite western-themed performance by Kris Kristofferson. With very little screen time, his Charlie Wade is more intimidating than any of his characters for Sam Peckinpah — truly scary. The way Wade baits his victims into giving his murders plausible doubt, reminds us of the demise of Keith Carradine in Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

 

The characterization of Miriam Colon’s Mercedes Cruz     is free of salt-of-the-earth immigrant clichés.  She’s like many hardworking citizens that may have cheated to ‘get in’: her defensive response to the flow of new migrants is to turn them in to the Border Patrol.

Rather than bemoan the borderland situation, Lone Star sees truth and forgiveness as the only way to give the next generation a decent chance. Nobody’s going to make race prejudice go away, but Sayles promotes the idea of flexibility. It accounts for the lengthy sidebar story at the army base, with Big Otis’s son Colonel Del learning to cut some slack for his young soldier Athena Johnson (Chandra Wilson of TV’s Grey’s Anatomy). Del can’t expect all of his recruits to share his altruistic motivation. Many are just like the unlucky Athena, who joined because she had few other opportunities.

The Odd Scene Out in Lone Star sees Sam Deeds visit his ex-wife Bunny (Frances McDormand), whose sports fanaticism verges on obsessive insanity. The scene is well written and played, yet it feels unwelcome — Bunny Deeds’ sports mania is a very real thing, but it’s an eccentric detour that doesn’t add that much to the story. We already sense that Sam left his marriage for good reasons, without needing to know what they were.

 

“All that other stuff, all that history? To hell with it, right?”

The special actress Elizabeth Peña was surrounded by an aura of decency and goodness. Looking at her filmography, we remember her in La Bamba,  … batteries not included, and  The Second Civil War, but we don’t see the breakaway roles that might have made her a bigger star. Her work here is exemplary. Pilar’s renewed romance with Sam turns out to have its own complications. They face realities like adults should, which is refreshing in itself.

Not every John Sayles films is wholly satisfying, but in Lone Star he seems to have accomplished all he set out to do. The assured plot progression introduces us to character after character who seems a living individual, not a narrative function. Sayles spends rewarding minutes with ‘inessential’ folk: a mixed-race Army couple, an elderly widow (Beatrice Winde), Otis Payne’s delightful wife Carolyn (Carmen De Lavallade of Odds Against Tomorrow). We don’t notice the absence of big production values at the army base. The biggest scene may be the civic gathering to see the unveiling of a statue. The thriller moments are taut but free of hype: Charlie Wade’s crimes, and desperate scenes crossing the Rio Grande, past and present.

Lone Star acknowledges that an entire social system can be built on myths both heroic and prejudiced. Doing the Right Thing means avoiding the trap of outright denial — but also acknowledging the hypocrisy in the least harmful way possible.

 


 

The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Lone Star looks great in a new 4K digital restoration supervised by John Sayles and his director of photography Stuart Dryburgh. The show was filmed in Super-35, with anamorphic-proportioned images that take in ‘Rio County’ sights both photogenic and ugly.

The soundtrack is graced by some truly beautiful mariachi ballads, and nicely-chosen pop songs for the flashbacks in 1957.

The keep case contains one 4K UHD disc and a second Blu-ray with the film and special features. We don’t get the depth of extras that were included on Criterion’s Matewan, but the interview pieces are more than satisfying. Cameraman Dryburgh fills us in on the shooting of the movie, while the always-personable John Sayles has a great discussion with director Gregory Nava, whose own films about ‘issues’ in America’s Southwest include the classic El Norte.

The new cover art by by Jacob Phillips is very good; we like it better than original poster designs.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson


Lone Star
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio
Supplements:
New conversation between John Sayles and filmmaker Gregory Nava
New interview with director of photography Stuart Dryburgh
Trailer
Insert foldout with an essay by Domino Renee Perez.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD disc and one Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed:
January 18, 2024
(7063lone)
CINESAVANT

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Text © Copyright 2024 Glenn Erickson

About Glenn Erickson

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Glenn Erickson left a small town for UCLA film school, where his spooky student movie about a haunted window landed him a job on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS effects crew. He’s a writer and a film editor experienced in features, TV commercials, Cannon movie trailers, special montages and disc docus. But he’s most proud of finding the lost ending for a famous film noir, that few people knew was missing. Glenn is grateful for Trailers From Hell’s generous offer of a guest reviewing haven for CineSavant.

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Trevor

An excellent movie. For those that have never seen it & want to try before they buy, it’s available to stream free with ads from Tubi from a so-so print, enjoy!

Jenny Agutter fan

My mom is from Texas, so she liked the focus on the battle over education there.

robert eggplant

HA! I found a copy on VHS someone was throwing out. It was a good watch.
I really love how in his 1983 film Lianna the director plays an unlikeable college film professor…who hits on a recently divorced woman about to come out as Lesbian. Not many auteurs around here that would create that kind of loathsome self-image
oh pS
Great review from Glen Erickson. I’m so glad we have your perspective watching movies

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[…] so some of the other tenants. The very pregnant Marisa Esteval (Elizabeth Peña of  La Bamba and  Lone Star) has pinned her hopes on the unlikely return of an absent, uncommitted boyfriend. Struggling artist […]

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[…] Secaucus Seven,  Lianna,  Matewan,  Eight Men Out,  Passion Fish,  The Secret of Roan Inish,  Lone Star,  Men With Guns and  Casa de los babys. City of Hope doesn’t […]

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