Lone Star Chad'z rating: **1/2 (out of 4 = OK) 1996, R, 135 minutes [2 hours, 15 minutes] [drama/western] starring: Chris Cooper (Sheriff Sam Deeds), Elizabeth Pena (Pilar Cruz), Kris Kristofferson (Sherrif Charlie Wade), Joe Morton (Col. Delmore Payne), produced by R. Paul Miller, Maggie Renzi, written and directed by John Sayles.
Independent films have been gaining respect in recent years because they're totally different from the mainstream, commercial films. What's so surprising about John Sayles' "Lone Star" is that it's really a glamorous Hollywood movie in dirty clothes. We get a 40-year-old mystery, a multi-layered story involving 100 important characters, forbidden romances, and messages about racism and family. The fact it tries to incorporate all of these things at the same time and equally emphasize their importance makes you feel like you've seen everything somewhere else.
The film starts off in a generic western manner as two men find a buried human skeleton, a badge, and a ring (shouldn't the clothes still be in tact too?). The good ol' Sheriff Sam Deeds (Cooper) is called in to check it out, and since he's the sheriff-in-a-small-Texas-town-in-a-w he's capable of solving mysteries almost immediately. He suspects the skeleton is that of the infamous Sheriff Charlie Deeds (Kristofferson), who, we learn through a series of multiple, inter-woven flashbacks, was a bully no one had the courage to stand up to. Wade is easily hateable, but that's the problem - it's so easy to hate him no other details are provided because Sayles assumes you don't need them, and this is how the film works as a whole.
Much of the film involves Sam's efforts to learn more about Wade by interviewing a lot of supposedly important characters like Wade's old whimpy sidekick who is now the mayor, or the town's most prominent black man who runs the place where all the blacks gather (there's a lot of ethnic stereotyping here). He also runs into his high school sweetheart, Pilar Cruz (Pena), who is now a school teacher.
You'd expect to see some detective work considering the elements, but this does not happen. Sam is supposed to be a sheriff? He seems more like a guy in beer commercial. All he does is wander aimlessly making for lots of flashbacks and sub-plots, which become drawn out after a while. When Pilar asks him why he "came back," he says, "for you" (gee, I wonder what they do after that?).
The sub-plots are probably supposed to be the point of the film as a classic literary theme of humanity is developed using racism and family conflict to establish this. Some of individual scenes themselves are interesting, but as whole they seem rather trite. A good example of this is a sub-plot involving Colonel Delmore Payne (Morton) and his inability to communicate with his troops and especially his own son - the same as what happened between him and his father. It's this kind of cyclical irony the film uses to be poetic, but it seems too generic to absorb.
What prevented me from really enjoying the film was the script itself. The dialogue here seems like something from a book or a play (surprisingly, this is an original screenplay), and the pacing often becomes tedious and boring. The many overlapping sub-plots aren't organized well enough to appreciate and follow them all. We follow Sam around for a large block of time, and then suddenly come back to a sub-plot we had almost forgotten about, then the pattern repeats itself.
"Lone Star" does not work as a mystery, especially considering how simple the ending is. However, it does work as a good character study, only in that many individual scenes are interesting. This film could have been great had it chosen one of its many elements and stuck with it. Unfortunately, it tries too hard to be too many things and it only seems to scratch the surface of its potential.
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e-mail: ChadPolenz@aol.com (C) 1997 Chad Polenz
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