Review of Lone Star
[In the following review, Klawans criticizes the storytelling technique in Lone Star, suggesting that Sayles is more interested in defying narrative conventions than in telling a good story.]
My editors disagree completely with the following remarks. Nevertheless: I think John Sayles gave away his game a couple of years ago in Passion Fish, his movie about a soap-opera star who is paralyzed in an accident—the sort of event she's been confronting five days a week on TV, and which she now faces in “real life.” The suppression of quotation marks, I think, is the game. “You know the boundaries of fiction,” Sayles seemed to say. “Now see how I break them down, to let in life itself.”
In other films, too, Sayles has announced his triumph over narrative conventions: the self-dramatizing lore of one-time radicals in Return of the Secaucus Seven, the myths of sportswriters in Eight Men Out, the fables of Irish patriarchs in The Secret of Roan Inish. To this list we may add the local legends and received histories of Texas, which Sayles now attempts to overcome in his new film, Lone Star.
In the border town of Frontera, in Rio County, everyone can tell a few stories about the late sheriff, tough-but-honest Buddy Deeds. One person in particular has heard all the yarns, at least a thousand times: Buddy's son Sam (Chris Cooper), who has returned to Frontera after a long absence and has been elected sheriff in his turn. One legend above all has come to obsess Sam: the tale of the night in 1957 when a young Buddy ran the previous sheriff out of town.
That man—Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson)—was an openly corrupt, racist killer. After Buddy faced him down, Wade simply disappeared. But now, as Lone Star begins, a couple of officers from the local Army base stumble across a ring, a badge and a set of bones, which no doubt belong to Wade. It falls to Sam (“Sheriff Junior”) to decide whether to follow Frontera custom and ignore the evidence, or to investigate and perhaps determine that his father's shining career began with murder.
While Sam busies himself debunking Frontera's rich oral tradition, a teacher named Pilar (Elizabeth Peña) is engaged in a similar struggle, this one against official history. With her support, her high school has instituted a new curriculum, to the distress of that half of the faculty for whom Sam Houston and Davy Crockett are still heroes of the white race, rather than agents of the cotton- and slave-traders. For a brief moment, Pilar's revisionism intersects with Sam's, after the town elders vote to put up a monument to Frontera's Korean War veterans, as exemplified by a sculpture of Buddy Deeds. Pilar's faction at the high school would rather see a sculpture of a Latino soldier—and so, it appears, would Sam.
But Pilar's main intersection with Sam takes place on personal grounds: their memories of having been high school sweethearts; their rancor and bafflement at having been separated back then; their present-day resumption of a relationship, carried out at a pace so glacial that it's more of a slide than a flirtation.
Once again, Sayles has set up narrative convention on one side and real life on the other, with Sam and Pilar carrying in their flesh all the truths that have been excluded from accepted history. That's the theme of Lone Star, and the structure, too. Pilar's perfunctory engagement in the debate over curriculum, and Sam's pursuit of the McGuffin-like killer, function almost entirely for the sake of exposition, providing excuses to introduce the information that Sayles feels the audience needs. (Like Springtime for Hitler, Lone Star is just crammed with historical goodies. Did you know that Texas used to be part of Mexico?) As for the climax of the film—the proof that the exposition matters—everything depends on the coming together of Sam and Pilar.
It's a well-conceived scheme, and ambitious, too (so ambitious that I haven't even mentioned a third major strand of the plot). And that, in a way, is the most damning thing I can say about Lone Star—because I've been able to get this far in my account without needing to discuss the movie.
How do characters hold themselves when they talk to one another? Are they proud of the clothes they wear, or would they dress differently if they could? When Pilar walks down the street, does Sam follow her with his eyes, or does he make himself look away? What is the camera looking at, while Sam stares at Pilar or his boots? How close does the camera stay to the characters? Does it plunge the audience into their eyes? Or does it hang back, allowing us to see people caught in the web of personal and local and national history? The life of a movie, from second to second, depends on the answers to these and a thousand other questions, none of which, unfortunately, requires comment in a description of Lone Star.
I'm not saying that Sayles is indifferent to these concerns, only that his direction is so slack it feels indifferent. Witness the scene in which Sam and Pilar finally find themselves alone. It's late at night in a deserted cafe. Here's Pilar, so lonely she's in danger of drying up; and here's Sam, a lean, handsome, serious man, in a town where such types are as rare as a geyser of lemonade. “You asked why I came back,” the geyser says with appropriate steam. “I came back because you were here.”
What does Pilar do? Does she bite off his lips? Does she perform an impromptu for percussion, using whatever beer bottles come to hand, to suggest that she won't allow Sam to screw her up again? No—although those responses might perk up the audience, they would be too soap opera-like for Sayles. Reasonably, veristically, he prefers to make Pilar hesitate in the face of temptation; he just can't figure out how she would do it. Sayles has her cross the room, walking as if she were balancing a book on her head, till she comes to the jukebox, where she pauses to comment on the antiquity of the selections; then, task accomplished, she drifts into Sam's arms and begins to dance with him. None of this action feels as if it comes from within Pilar—which is to say, it doesn't arise from any emotional exchange between Elizabeth Peña and Chris Cooper, or from any momentum generated by editing, camera placement or camera movement. It's just a bit of business, which Sayles has imposed upon the character.
It would be easy to multiply examples, but pointlessly cruel. Everywhere in Lone Star, Sayles's version of “real life”—let us reinstate the quotation marks—turns out to be as factitious as the conventions of soap opera, only blander. And that is often the case in his movies. When his actors are exceptional—Alfre Woodard, David Strathairn and Joe Morton come to mind—the screen comes alive, however fitfully. When the actors can't pull off the trick, we're left with an abstract world, populated by characters who are little more than moral categories: Sayles's notions of how people ought to behave and what they ought to believe.
In past years, Pauline Kael used to amuse herself (and a few million readers) by railing against moral improvement. I would suggest she was slightly off the mark. Moral improvement has been a goal of the arts for millennia; anyone who looks forward to seeing it end had better take her vitamins. The problem, rather, lies with those moralists who are so concerned with their own virtue that they don't feel the need to perform an artist's labor, or don't know what such labor might mean. Do they define virtue in civic and political terms? All the worse; they make politics dull.
Sayles is intelligent and prolific, low in budget and high of mind. For those reasons, I have passed over his films in discreet silence till now, preferring to turn my aggressive tendencies against products such as Twister. If I break the silence now, perhaps it's because Bill Clinton and Bob Dole will be broadcasting their own homilies nonstop from now through November. If movies are to provide us with public space during these wan times, then let it be a space where people bite off each other's lips and smash beer bottles, where political debate entertains and romance comes complete with secretions. Better to be of the devil's party, I say, than to stand with Sayles and the angels.
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