John Sayles makes a patient, absorbing mystery out of a Texas border town’s divided history. The ensemble gives its many connections emotional weight, although the writing occasionally makes those connections too neat to believe.
John Sayles’s Lone Star is an absorbing mystery with enough interest in people to make its patient pace worthwhile. We recommend it, with a reservation about how neatly its many stories sometimes fit together. A murder investigation and a romance give the film a route through a Texas border town, where family loyalties and racial divisions complicate the business of living alongside one another. Sayles takes those complications seriously, allowing the surrounding lives to occupy much of the film’s 135 minutes.
That breadth is the point of the writing, although it takes a little time to settle into its rhythm. Sayles keeps asking who gets to tell the town’s history, and what their version leaves out. Moving between generations, he makes inherited grievances matter to the mystery without reducing every character to a source of information. This gives the investigation weight: we want an answer, but we also want to understand why these people have so much difficulty sharing a place.
Chris Cooper is a persuasive centre as Sam Deeds, keeping the effort of thinking visible without making a display of it. Elizabeth Peña gives Pilar Cruz an emotional directness that the film needs amid all the patient unravelling. Both performances suit a film in which listening is often more revealing than speaking. The larger cast rewards the same attention, with Kris Kristofferson’s Charlie Wade and Matthew McConaughey’s Buddy Deeds registering clearly even as Sayles asks us to keep track of numerous other lives.
The shifts in time are where the filmmaking becomes especially expressive. Stuart Dryburgh’s cinematography helps the different periods feel part of the same place, while Sayles, also the editor, gives the transitions an unforced rhythm. We were moved by those returns to the past, because seeing an earlier generation makes the town’s divisions feel learned, and therefore avoidable. The changes of period also encourage us to reconsider characters whose place in the story initially seemed straightforward.
Dan Bishop’s production design helps make the town credible as a shared home for people with sharply different experiences of it. The surroundings support the social distinctions without demanding a separate explanation of each one. Mason Daring’s music is similarly useful in giving the many strands a sense of belonging to one film. Neither contribution competes with the actors, which matters when so much depends on our willingness to hear another person’s account.
The weakness is that Sayles occasionally makes the connections too convenient. With so many lives interwoven, there are passages where we become conscious of the writer bringing everyone into position. At times the gradual revelations are so orderly that we start noticing the preparation for them, and the actors cannot make every connection persuasive. A little more room for loose ends would have helped, particularly in a film otherwise so attentive to the difficulties of getting people to agree about anything.
The Western here becomes a way of examining who holds authority in a town, and whose account is accepted. Its attention to race, money and family gives the small-town mystery plenty to occupy us beyond the solution. It takes concentration to follow everyone, but the performances repay it. Choose it for an evening when nobody needs the investigation to proceed in a straight line.
