Lone Star ****

(Regie: John Sayles; cast: Chris Cooper, Kris Kristofferson, Elizabeth Pena)
 

This week's cinematic gem is the latest effort by independent-patron John Sayles (Passion Fish, Matewan, City of Hope), a writer-director who seems incapable of making a bad movie.

This epic tale of borderline conflict and Oedipal secrets may well be Sayle's best film to date. It's certainly his most convincingly political. Lone Star is a caleidoscopic narrative about a young marshall (Sam Deeds, played by Chris Cooper) in a Tex-Mexican border town who stumbles upon a hidden secret that may well compromise the mythical reputation of his father, legendary lawman Buddy Deeds. As Sam digs deeper into the political interests and racist feelings that have shaped his town, he not only lays bare the murderous deeds of his father's colleague and nemesis, demonic gunslinger Charley Wade (played brilliantly by Kris Kristofferson in a role that succeeds in out-menacing master of menace Dennis Hopper in David Lynch's Blue Velvet), but also discovers why the local Mexican community is so quiet about its immigrant past and why his feelings for luscious Elizabeth Pena seem so "unnatural".

Lone Star is a brooding drama about hero-worship, ethnic and national identity, American history and geographical/psychological/cultural borderlines that manages a sense of complexity and uncertain meaning that is usually reserved for the very best of American novelists. Sayles, who has himself penned a number of novels that look back to both Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis, has made a film that is as fluent, convincing and haunting in its narration as those illustrious examples. He is aided by a more than able cast headed by Sayles-regular Chris Cooper as the son looking for the father behind the myth, Elizabeth Pena as a woman whose interest in both personal and political history almost destroys her and Kris Kristofferson who is once again in his best Peckinpah-form.

It is no coincidence then that Sam Peckinpah, who made several masterworks exploring the violent history of the American Frontier (The Wild Bunch, Ride the High Country, Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia), is the filmmaker whose influence is most deeply felt in Sayles' masterly story of historical entrapment and personal redemption.

TOM PAULUS
 

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