For the longest time, I’d only ever seen two John Sayles movies. My first, weirdly enough, was the 2004 political satire Silver City, starring Chris Cooper as an inept Republican running for governor of Colorado. My dad thought it looked funny, this was the peak of the Daily Show, after all, but the film turned out to be far more serious and complex than my underdeveloped teenage brain was prepared for.
The second John Sayles movie I saw was what I imagine is his best-known film, Eight Men Out, about the 1919 Black Sox Scandal. Everybody likes a solid baseball movie, and it had some big names for the time, including John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, Christopher Lloyd, and John Mahoney.
And now I’ve seen three John Sayles movies. So what do I think?
I think John Sayles might be one of America’s most underrated storytellers. Notice I didn’t include movies John Sayles wrote but didn’t direct. That’s because his work-for-hire screenplays paint an entirely different picture from his directorial work. Starting out as an alumnus of the Roger Corman film school, Sayles wrote films such as Piranha, The Lady in Red, Battle Beyond the Stars, Alligator, and The Howling. The crazy thing is that despite all of those being B-movies, most of them are pretty damn good.
There’s no reason a Jaws knockoff like Piranha should be as good as it is. What’s Sayles’ secret? He writes great characters. Very much an “actor’s director”, he’s acted quite a bit himself, I noticed Sayles loves to build worlds and develop his central characters before throwing them into the action. It doesn’t surprise me that in his later years Sayles has pivoted to novels because his characters and ideas always feel too big for a single movie.
That was my takeaway from Lone Star. Ten minutes in, I thought, “This had to have been a book, right?” We have this town, Frontera, Texas, and we explore its history through time jumps, different perspectives, and its diverse townsfolk. There’s a lot of information and solid character drama being thrown at you. It’s amazing Sayles was making these kinds of movies with the budgets he had and the lack of star power.
Though Sayles often lacked star power, he made up for it with talented character actors. Chris Cooper, who worked with Sayles five times, plays Sam Deeds, the sheriff of the border town of Frontera as it’s in the midst of a cultural shift. It’s remarked in the film that the white community is becoming a minority in Frontera, leading to racial tension among the town’s white, Hispanic, and Black communities.
If tensions in the community weren’t bad enough, the skeletal remains of a body are discovered at an old shooting range. Sam discovers the remains of the town’s former corrupt sheriff, Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson), who disappeared in 1957. Sam tries to piece together the mystery by talking to townsfolk who knew and remembered Wade. We also get pieces of Wade’s story through flashbacks to the 1950s, where Matthew McConaughey plays Sam’s now-deceased father, Buddy. Sam’s father is a revered figure in the town’s history, but Sam fears what unsavory truths he might uncover about him as he digs deeper into Wade’s murder.
Rounding out the cast is Elizabeth Peña as Pilar, a schoolteacher and one of Sam’s old flames; Ron Canada as a popular club owner; Joe Morton as Army Colonel Delmore Payne; and the great Clifton James, better known as Sheriff Pepper from the Bond films, as the town’s mayor, Hollis Pogue. It’s a real who’s who of “Who’s that guy?” But they’re all great.
Lone Star dives into family legacy and cultural identity over a lively 135 minutes. It’s not as funny as a Coen Brothers movie, but it feels similar in its plotting and the winding trail of breadcrumbs the characters follow. Honestly, if the film had featured a few bigger names, I think it would be much better known. It did receive an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, but 1996 was the year of Fargo, so Lone Star’s chances were dead on arrival.
I’d love to watch more John Sayles films. Looking at his filmography, he loves telling diverse stories that explore different time periods and regions. He’s not a household name, but he should be. Thanks to the Criterion Collection for keeping his films in the conversation. There’s always something to talk about when it comes to John Sayles.