Lone Star review – John Sayles' powerful crime drama is an extraordinary relic of '90s Hollywood | Film

This revival of John Sayles's 1996 Western crime drama is a reminder that he provided an important but now perhaps overlooked branch of indie filmmaking and myth-making in '90s Hollywood, different from the brilliant ironies and shocks of Tarantino or the literary noir of the Coen brothers. Lone Star is a rich and densely made film that tells a lot in two and a quarter hours; it is thoughtful and complex and adult, a film about the old West and the new West and about the culture wars in Texas and Mexico, about the melancholy spectacle of old white men in Stetsons drinking coffee together, about who owns the narrative and who prints the legend. And it is a film about Freudian fear of the father and the embrace of the taboo, with an extraordinary and very subversive ending.

The action takes place in the (fictional) small town of Frontera, Texas, which is attractive to a certain kind of visitor because of its proximity to the border and a world of cheap sex in Mexico. In the grim words of Sheriff Sam Deeds, played by Sayles' regular actor Chris Cooper, the town should have a tourist slogan: “Gateway to cheap pussy.” Sam should be in a good mood because the local courthouse is named after his late father, Buddy, who was once the town's sheriff himself, but Sam is dejected because a couple of treasure hunters with a metal detector have dug up a skeleton with a “Lone Star” badge in some nearby rough brush. It is apparently the remains of a notoriously racist and corrupt lawman from even earlier times named Charlie Wade, played in a flashback by Kris Kristofferson.

The rumor (which can barely be spoken) is that Wade was actually shot and secretly buried there by Buddy himself, played in flashbacks by Matthew McConaughey. There was another beta-male sycophantic officer, played phlegmatically in the present by Clifton James. But when Sam goes around asking questions about this skeleton and his rusted badge, the whole community stirs as if awakened from a troubled sleep.

Sam himself is divorced – Frances McDormand makes a great cameo as his hapless, hyperactive, football-mad ex-wife – and he has returned to his hometown because he has never forgotten his Mexican high school love Pilar, now a history teacher played by Elizabeth Peña; her job is now complicated as she must argue with angry parents about the way she teaches Tex-Mex subjects. Meanwhile, Pilar's demanding mother Mercedes (Míriam Colón) runs a restaurant that, like many other such establishments, employs illegal immigrants, institutionalizing the ongoing crisis of loyalty. African-Americans, the third ethnic presence after Anglos and Mexicans, are represented in a bar run by Otis Payne (Ron Canada), whose estranged son Delmore (Joe Morton) is an ambitious, career-oriented army officer.

These people form a constellation of stories and flashpoints of repressed emotions and pain, from which Cooper's Sam emerges as the central character, going through a kind of midlife crisis as he remembers how cruelly his father destroyed his relationship with Pilar when they were children. Sayles also creates a particular kind of flashback for Sam and Pilar by moving the camera in one unbroken physical space from the pensive middle-aged Sam to the actor playing the child he was: a theatrical technique that emphasizes that all these events took place in the same place and not so long ago.

The truth is that the terror that once accompanied intermarriage, a bigotry that dominated life in decades past, is gradually fading. Perhaps the tribal differences that everyone grew up with – and that, in people's minds, make up the very notion of “history” – will blur and disappear. A truly gripping and powerfully acted drama, one that Sayles directs with a distinctive kind of Zen wisdom.