Lone Star
Tags: mystery, alternate history, murder, flashback

Plot synopsis:
Sheriff Sam Deeds is the county sheriff in Frontera, Texas. He was born and raised in Frontera, and returned two years ago to be sheriff. Sam's late father had been the legendary Sheriff Buddy Deeds, who is remembered as fair and just. Sam had problems with his father and the pair routinely fought.
Sam is particularly disapproving of efforts by business leader Mercedes Cruz and Buddy's former deputy, Mayor Hollis Pogue, to enlarge and rename the local courthouse in Buddy's honor; he considers it an unneeded waste of taxpayers' money. As a teenager, Sam had been in love with Mercedes's daughter Pilar, but the courtship was strongly opposed by Buddy and Mercedes. After a chance meeting, Sam and the widowed Pilar, now a local teacher, slowly resume their relationship.
Colonel Delmore Payne has recently arrived in town as the commander of the local U.S. Army base. Delmore is the son of Otis "Big O" Payne, a local nightclub owner and leading figure in the area's African-American community. The two are estranged because of Otis's serial infidelity and abandonment of Delmore's mother when Delmore was a child. Relic hunters discover a human skeleton on an old shooting range along with a Masonic ring, a Rio County sheriff's badge, and a bullet not used by the military. Sam brings in Texas Ranger Ben Wetzel to help with the case. Wetzel tells Sam that forensics identify the skeleton as that of Charlie Wade, the corrupt sheriff who preceded Buddy. Wade had mysteriously disappeared in 1957, taking $10,000 in county funds, after which Buddy became sheriff.
Sam investigates the events leading up to Wade's murder. He learns that Wade terrorized the local African-American and Mexican communities, including numerous murders where he asks his innocent victims to dig out any weapon they might have, to then justify shooting them for "resisting arrest". Wade used this method to murder Cruz's husband, Eladio, in front of Deputy Hollis. Sam visits Wesley Birdsong, a Native American and a roadside tourist stand owner, who reveals that Buddy was a wild young adult who settled down after becoming a deputy sheriff and marrying Sam's mother – though he did have a mistress, whose name Wesley claims to have forgotten. Sam travels to San Antonio, where he visits his marginally mentally ill ex-wife Bunny and searches through his father's things, where he discovers love letters to Buddy's mistress.
Sam confronts Hollis and Otis about Wade's murder. Wade extorted money from a young Otis for running an illegal gambling operation in the bar, then was about to use his "resisting arrest" setup to kill Otis. Buddy arrived just as Hollis shot Wade to prevent Otis's murder. The three buried the body and took the $10,000 from the county and gave it to Mercedes – who was destitute after Eladio's recent death – to buy her restaurant. Hollis reveals that Buddy and Mercedes did not take up until some time later. Sam decides to drop the issue, saying it will remain an unsolved mystery. Hollis voices concern that, when the skeleton is revealed to be Wade, people will assume Buddy killed him to take his job, to which Sam states that Buddy's legend can handle it.
Sam learns that Hollis and Mercedes have recruited his own deputy to run against him in the next election. He decides to not run for re-election.
Sam tells Pilar that Eladio died 18 months, rather than "a few weeks", before she was born. Sam shows Pilar an old photo of Buddy and Mercedes, revealing that Buddy is her father. Both are hurt over the deception but decide that, since she cannot have any more children, they will continue their romantic relationship, despite the knowledge that they are half-siblings.

Review: However when Sam begins to ask questions that go deeper than the legends, he finds secrets within the border town that hit very near home.Having just watched The Hi Lo Country (a modern day western with a sprawling story but focused on one thing), I was put in mind to watch Lone Star again.
As director he is great as well, avoiding the washed out desert feel many `Mexico related' films have and instead goes for richer colours that reflect the rich mix of communities that are in his story.The acting is faultless all round.
No one actor stands out regardless of screen time simply because no one goes over the top and everyone realises they are playing part of a story  even Cooper (realistically the nearest thing to a lead actor) plays it down rather than taking the film over.
The spine of the film is Sherrif Sam Deed's investigation into a thirty-year-old murder, yet this story is quickly absorbed by many finely scripted subplots and an overall theme on the futility of trying to escape history.
John Sayles' direction of this film reminded me of Hitchcock in that I was always aware of the director's style and I enjoyed it every bit as much as the acting and the story.
Lone Star is an amazing film: characters that are on screen for even a few minutes come of as real people, flesh and blood, no cardboard cut-outs here.
It starts when they discover the remains of racist Sheriff Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson), murdered under mysterious circumstances many years earlier; Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) leads the investigation.
An entrancing yarn that takes place in a small, quiet Texas border town where the memories of two former lawmen, the crooked Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson) and the legendary Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey) are slowly resurrected when the remains of Wade are found on an deserted Army firing range by Deeds' son, Sam (Chris Cooper), who is the current town sheriff.
Writer-director-editor John Sayles serves up an unpredictable gem here with a great cast that includes Joe Morton, Elisabeth Pena, Frances McDormand, etc., and to me, it seems like nearly all the characters here make sense right up to the end..
John Sayles is not only a great director, but he is also a truly great writer, and "Lone Star" is simply one of the best-written films of all time.
This is a character study of the highest order, and there's no point in discussing the actual events of the film further because this is a film that is best seen (or, indeed, read) with fresh eyes, and I'd hate to spoil that for readers who haven't seen the film.It's a sad fact of life that directors like Sayles, who see films as stories that must be told, and direct them well, but without intrusive and obvious stylistic quirks, are less noticed than directors who practically beg for attention.
A film which instead features an involving mystery and an affecting romance, as well as numerous subplots (all beautifully paced and integrated), and in which almost everything proves to be connected.Great works of art shouldn't have to throw their message into the audience's faces.
In Lone Star, everything - the arguments about race and the past, the tangible sense of a real community, the subversiveness of the film's ending - flows from what is at base simply a good story.
John Sayles is one of the best--and certainly among the most interesting--American directors working in film today.
Virtually never does he make the same film twice, and almost all of them are a great pleasure to watch."Lone Star" is Sayles' masterpiece.
Set in a Texas border town, it creates a rich world peopled with characters and situations we understand and identify with.There is plot, mood, color, drama, passion, suspense and even humor, but if pressed to explain what it really is about, I would say that the theme is how the present is a product of the past, and how people are given opportunities to be imprisoned by it or to transcend it."Lone Star" is one of only two American films of this decade (the other is "Schindler's List") to which I would give a '10'.
John Sayles' best film: amazing, epic story; beautifully told in elegant flashbacks, featuring Chris Cooper in one of his best roles.
Look for Frances McDormand late in the movie in a hilarious cameo as the sheriff's ex-wife.It is a real shame that this film was nominated for only one Academy Award in screen writing.
It's the way the film is woven and the atmosphere that is created throughout (a John Sayles specialty.) Granted, it IS a character study with general societal overtones, so it may appear "slow" in comparison to big budget special effects action movies, or kick-in-the-groin comedies (our unfortunate obsessions), but if you stick with it for just a bit, you'll find the beautifully crafted tapestry unfolding through the characters with riveting intrigue.
What may seem like a cut-and-dried attitude, for example, by Buddy Deeds(Matthew McConaughey) towards his son Sam(played as an adult by Chris Cooper) and Pilar(played as an adult by Elizabeth Pena) going out together, is revealed to be something altogether different.Cooper brings to mind another Cooper, Gary, with his performance here.
LONE STAR is absolutely one of the best movies ever made (and, yes, I am including the great, older classics in that, not just the past few decades' lot).
He has made movies of extreme excellence before and since LONE STAR (his worst movies have more worth than most filmmakers' best), but this one is the zenith thus far (well, I haven't seen MATEWAN, about which I've heard raves for years, or SILVER CITY, which was reportedly not top Sayles, but look forward to both of them).
Oh, and the reviewer here who said Chris Cooper and Elizabeth Pena have no chemistry must be numb--the relationship is intense, leading to one of the hottest love scenes in film history..
Around this, writer-director John Sayles spins several human-drama stories, spanning 40 years, each of which deserve a movie of their own.
Even the relationships side is not without intrigue, so the whole movie requires you to piece together the puzzle, like a good drama should.Superb performance by Chris Cooper in the lead role.
Its a set of interwoven stories set in two time periods as Chris Cooper a border town sheriff who has returned to his home town where his father was a legendary Sheriff investigates a 40 year old murder that may have been committed by his own father.
Great acting by Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Pena, Matthew McCounaghy, and Kris Krostofferson help make this movie into the fine viewing experience it is.Chris Cooper, playing Sam Deeds, is seeking to know how a skeleton found on a old firing range is connected to his late father, Buddy Deeds.
You feel like you are there experiencing the tensions and clash of cultures good and bad.The mystery builds and with it a fantastic love story with an unexpected plot twist.Highly recommended.
This movie has a most unusual depth and diversity of characters and cultures that spans many generations (at times back into 19th century history), the only film I can think of that comes close is "Gone with the Wind." The crime scene investigation is only the outermost layer of the onion.
Quite a few other great films come to mind, but Sayles' "Lone Star" is uniquely its vision, its own style.
Set in Texas, the movie slowly unfolds the secrets behind the mythical sheriff, Buddy Deed (Matthew McConaughey) and the actions of the past that have come to play a crucial part in the present.Sam Deed (Chris Cooper) is the new sheriff in town, living under the heavy expectations of his heroic father, who discovers a dead body in the Texan desert.
"Lone Star" opens with the discovery of skeletal remains, and the calling in of local sheriff Sam Deeds (played by Chris Cooper.) The opening leads you to believe that you're in for a murder mystery focusing around the investigation into the identity of both the victim and the killer.
The focus is on the relationship between current sheriff Deeds and his father, a former legendary sheriff in the same town (played in flashbacks by Matthew McConaghey), but there are other families portrayed as well - frankly too many, especially given that I didn't find many of the family issues all that interesting.In fact, I thought the whole movie was rather dry.
I give director John Sayles credit for the seamless way he worked the flashbacks into the main story, and the resolution of the mystery around the killer came as a bit of a surprise to me.
It contains startling revelations, an absolutely sizzling script (full of quotable one-liners) and a great cast, ranging from Matthew McConaughey who has little to do, Joe Morton (who you should recognise from Terminator 2, Executive Decision etc), Frances McDormand as a slightly eccentric woman to Chris Cooper (American Beauty) who is phenomenal as the film's lead.Set deep in Texas, near to the Mexican border, the plot starts when two off duty Sergeants find a skull, a Sheriff's badge and a Masonic ring.
I cannot even begin to explain the rest of the plot, you should just go and watch it and see what I mean.As well as the story-telling, the cinematography was beautiful, especially the seamless transitions from the present into flashbacks and memories and then back again - they are brilliantly choreographed, but again you must watch the film to see what I mean.The ending has a very Oldboy-style twist and although I guessed many of the twists to come they did not take away from the film at all, I guessed what had happened but wanted to know why and how.An absolute peach!.
John Sayles wrote the original screenplay for, and directed, "Lone Star." If his script fails to portray the development and intersection of ethnic relations, marital relations, migration, cultural assimilation, politics, education, big business, and even the army in the southern and western United States, from the Treaty of Payne's Landing and eviction of the Seminoles from Florida in 1832 to the cross-border migration of Mexicans to south Texas in the 1990's, it's not for lack of trying.
In this film, we get a good mix of white, black and Hispanic as the story takes place in border town in Texas.
Lone Star is solidly on my top 10 list.The story is of Sam Deeds (Cooper) the son of a former popular sheriff Buddy Deeds (McConaughey) of a small border town (loosely patterned after Del Rio, Texas) who returns to take the same job his father had.
John Sayles' "Lone Star" is, above all else, a film about the past, personal and historical, and its impact on the citizens of a small Texas town.
In doing so "Lone Star" misses greatness, but it is hardly a bad film.That's because Sayles understands the interaction between temporal ecstasies rather well.
This is also one of the greatest payoffs of John Sayles' superb film, Lone Star.
Intermittent flashbacks from 40 years ago show Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey) as a deputy working under corrupt racist Sheriff Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson).This is a vast wide story of a small corner of the world.
In fact one of the only misleading things about the movie is the poster, which, when I was younger passing by the tape in the store (without, ignorantly of course, looking at the back of the cover) I thought it was some oddball Texas horror movie.Maybe in its way it is sort of a horror movie, but more about the terror of secrets meant to be buried like the skull and badge of the long-gone Sheriff Wade (Kris Kristofferson) who we see in flashbacks as a mean SOB s***-kicker who didn't take no guff from no one, whether it was his fellow officer (Matthew McConaughey in a small but great role), or a black or a Mexican.
It's in this backdrop that the present-day story unfolds as a mix of murder mystery, political scandal and gladhanding, military hiccups, immigration, and interracial romance, with Chris Cooper as the sheriff in present day finding out thing after thing that makes him more disillusioned.It's easy to say the message of the movie, if it has one, can boil down to "It's all BS and it's bad for ya," but what is so engrossing about Lone Star is how Sayles depicts these people as trying to be good as they can be (the ones we're meant to see as good anyway), and that they have to navigate a lifetime full of discrimination and being apart and being told what to do, whether it's someone who is black or Mexican or a white person trying to be with a Mexican (that too, in its way, is a form of racism).
It's a supporting plot line and yet it's not padding, it's not something unnecessary, it like many other scenes that show how characters act and react to the world around them can't help but be shaped by the place they're in - Good ol' Boy land Texas - and how they navigate through being a minority in this place.Acting across the board is solid (even Frances McDormand, who I almost forgot was in the movie by the time she shows up, gets a scene stealer of a performance to give), and the writing is sharp and trusting of its audience that if it takes its time the rewards will be gradual and satisfying.
Chris Cooper and Kris Kristofferson respectively, play two Mexican border sheriffs in John Sayle's excellent movie, but one is dead and the other is very much alive.This is a brooding, simmering and multi-layered drama of the highest order.
A discussion among local teachers about how best to teach the state's history sets up the rich portion of the plot which revolves around issues of ethnicity, while simultaneously (cleverly) misdirecting the viewer's expectations about one of the movie's major mysteries.It is amazing that John Sayles can come in from outside and understand this region so well.
In short, Sayles, who was writer as well as director, superbly did his homework.Pena, McDormand, Chris Cooper, Matthew McConaughey, Kris Kristofferson, Joe Morton, and Clifton James are all great.
Independent film maker John Sayles takes the western for a wild ride through present day Texas in Lone Star.Sayles shows the darker side of the small border town of Fontera, a town where the past haunts its residents, in particular Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper).
The film is spectacular thanks to Sayles ingenious work.The story of Lone Star is a combination of a murder mystery and social conflicts.
Lone Star was amazing the first time I saw it, and it gets better with each successive viewing.The film opens with one character's suggestion that if you're going to live in a place, you should learn something about it.
Like the investigation into the meaning of "rosebud" in Citizen Kane, the discovery of a skull and the resulting investigation uncovers the complexities of life in a small community.I can't think of a single theme Sayles doesn't allude to in this film (man v.
Underlying everything is the idea that things are rarely as they appear, that no person's version of history is an absolute, and that it is only through understanding and coming to terms with our past that we can truly embrace the future.While I could wax poetic about the cinematography, camera angles, scene transitions, Sayle's ability to capture the true essence of a small border town in Texas (right down to the Shiner Bock beer - which wasn't widely available when Lone Star was filmed), what I find most remarkable is that in almost twenty viewings of this film, I learn something new about the characters and ultimately discover more about myself with each subsequent viewing..
Must See. What can I say...easily in my Top Ten. Good characters, excellent actors giving great performances, interesting plot but most important a love story that touches the soul.
John Sayles has always made films with many stories intertwined but none are better than this little masterpiece about a Texas bordertown spanning two generations and tons of conflict.
A fine cast helps: Chris Cooper is Sam Deeds; Elizabeth Pena is his main squeeze and then some; and Frances McDormand is memorable in a one-scene role as Sam's ex-wife Bunny, an avid Dallas Cowboys fan accurately described as "highly-strung." In extensive flashbacks, Kris Kristofferson is Charlie Wade and Matthew McConaughey is Buddy Deeds.A sad but absorbing story, "Lone Star" has the ring of truth..
Full of excellent performances, including an inspired turn by Kris Kristofferson as a sadistic local sheriff, and with a plot that contains enough twists and turns to keep any viewer interested, Lone Star comes highly recommended..
"Lone Star" cemented John Sayles' place as the best director working today.
Now that that's out of the way...I think, next to Men With Guns, this is the best John Sayles movie.
I had to watch this through twice to really get it-parts I liked the best were everything with Chris Cooper digging into Kristofferson's past, and Cooper's affair with Elizabeth Pena.(What a twist involving them, too, at the end huh?) I liked the international links in the film, and the way that Sayles showed how all the differing races, cultures and languages intertwine in the town, the plot and in each other's lives.
Without really making any social or political point, it certainly depicts an interesting subplot out of the racial issue, in a community where openness has not totally erased mistrust.The effective portrayal of characters is also to be noted, as well as the overall craftmanship of the film.One more thing: Despite the fact that the story is placed in southern Texas, there is a sheriff present and a lot of characters use cowboy hats, I wouldn't be sure this is enough to make this movie a western..