Pilar: Everything that went before, all that stuff, that history–the hell with it, right?
Lone Star (1996) closes on a middle-aged couple, Sam and Pilar, holding hands on the hood of a car, looking up at a decrepit drive-in screen in the South Texas sun. That drive-in was very important to them a long time ago, but it has fallen to ruin. Consistent with the themes of the movie, that drive-in has ceased to function but still occupies space and prevents people from moving on.
The couple sit there at the site of a long-ago tryst, and they are reconciling the newfound knowledge that they are half-siblings… but are still in love. When the scene (and the movie) closes, they’ve decided that this knowledge will not stand in the way of their relationship. They are through letting the sins of their parents’ generation determine their way in life. This may come off as maudlin on the page, but it is a profoundly moving resolution to the conflict between two generations across the course of the movie. John Sayles’ script, which he also directs, gives equal weight to the past and the present across multiple storylines. The two forces, past and present, are directly at odds throughout the movie, competing for control of the narrative of local history. On the character level, the movie is about finding a path forward that isn’t beholden to those who came before.
The first frames of the movie serve up this thesis. Some career Army men are tooling around with a metal detector on an abandoned firing range when they unearth a skeleton wearing a Rio County sheriff’s badge and a Masonic ring. Prior to this discovery, the men talk about what the area used to be (an Army firing range), what it is now (home to cacti and yuccas), what it will be in the future (either a prison or a shopping mall). One of the two men even uses the spent cartridges he finds with the metal detector to create art, a literal repurposing of the past into something useful in the present. But the most literal of the relics of the past is that long-dead corpse they find among the cacti.
Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) has immediate suspicions as to the identity of this corpse. Former Sheriff and general extortionist Charley Wade (Kris Kristoffersen) loomed large when Sam was a kid: everyone in town paid him protection money or found themselves dead or in jail. There wasn’t a business in Rio County that didn’t feel the squeeze of Sheriff Wade’s racket. However, Wade went missing one night about 20 years back, after a very public confrontation with Sam’s dad, Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), a deputy sick of turning a blind eye.
The discovery of the skeleton happens just as a bust of Buddy is set to be unveiled in front of the courthouse in a public park. You see, Buddy became sheriff after Wade went missing, and the locals were so in terror of Charley Wade that Buddy seemed a saint in comparison. As local entrepreneur and bartender Otis Payne says:
“I don’t recall a prisoner ever died in [Sheriff Buddy’s] custody. I don’t recall a man in this town–Black, White, Mexican–who’d hesitate a minute before they’d call on Buddy Deeds to solve a problem. More than that I wouldn’t like to say.”
Buddy’s son Sam has been living under his father’s shadow his whole life. Even Sam’s career path was determined by the elder townies when they needed a Buddy-adjacent sheriff who they could lean on when they wanted sweetheart deals on construction permits and whatnot. Manmade lakes, built by flooding towns in the name of progress and new suburban construction, is another way that Sayles shows the present burying the past and the US culture burying indigenous culture.
The lionization of Buddy is in no small part due to the rumor that he murdered ol’ Charley Wade, although that part probably won’t be inscribed on the memorial. But the upshot is that Sam is scheduled to deliver a speech at the unveiling of a monument to the past that will literally stare him down every day as he enters the building.
Pilar (Elizabeth Peña) also finds herself in conflict with the past. First off, her mother Mercedes (Míriam Colón), owner of one of the most visually comforting restaurants in cinema history, has very different ideas about surviving in Texas than does Pilar. Mercedes favors complete assimilation (constantly chastising her employees when they speak in Spanish instead of English), and uses the trauma of her murdered husband to pass judgment on Pilar’s choices in partners. Even divorce doesn’t help Pilar escape the past as her mother throws digs about Pilar’s ex-husband. Second, Pilar teaches history at the local high school, and must deal with a whole passel of parents who prefer rather narrow views of history (the movie’s themes of reckoning with or ignoring history are eternally relevant, but feel especially so in the US in recent years). These parents prefer the John Wayne movie idea of great, flawless men and like to ignore the messy truth. And they resent Pilar’s attempts to teach history from less biased sources:
Pilar: “We’re not changing anything, we’re presenting a more complete picture.”
Anglo Mother: “And that’s what’s got to stop!”
Pilar’s past also creates internal conflict when she runs into her high school love, Sam Deeds, after many years apart. Pilar is a jumble of emotions when she sees Sam, as he’s bringing her son (Eladio, played by Gilbert R. Cuellar Jr.) out from the holding cells at the jail, busted for installing a stolen radio in his buddy’s car.
We eventually learn that Sam’s dad Buddy caught him and Pilar together (in flagrante delicto) and they were pulled apart, never to see each other again. We also learn late in the movie, well after the two have reconnected, that Buddy kept them apart because he and Mercedes had a years-long affair and that he was secretly Pilar’s father. But for now, they are feeling out the years since they parted, and reckoning with the younger versions of themselves hangs over many of their scenes. Pilar’s fear of Eladio being like his father seems to reflect this.
Otis Payne (Ron Canada) and Major Delmore Payne (Joe Morton) also must reckon with the past in another storyline. Delmore is estranged from his father Otis, never forgiving how Otis lived in such a brutal county, or how he moved on to new wives and girlfriends, leaving his son Delmore behind. Delmore has recently taken command of the local Army base, and his son Chet (played by Eddie Robinson) sets off this storyline when he stops by Otis’ bar to meet his grandfather for the first time. Otis survived a lot of grief in his time, and even was culpable in the murder of Sheriff Wade (well, it happened at the bar, by a deputy, to save Otis’ life). But Delmore doesn’t know that: his regimented present was shaped by Otis’ absence in the past, and he is pushing that fierce regimentation onto his own son Chet. A later scene between Chet and Otis, wherein Chet learns that his ancestry includes Black Cherokee settlers, shows how much Delmore has walled off the past. But there must be a reason for Delmore to be back in Rio County: he wants to confront his father and the past, even if he won’t admit it to himself.
Lone Star is full of all manner of older townies, populated from among Sayles’ stable of regulars. And many of these characters lionize Buddy and tell tales of ol’ Buddy Deeds and the evil Charley Wade. Sam has lived his whole life with awkward pauses when he enters a room just as someone has just compared him unfavorably to his dead father. As Sam’s investigation progresses and it is confirmed that the corpse is indeed that of Sheriff Charley Wade, Sam must speak with some of these folks to pick at the fraying edges of memories from two decades back. So now even the time-consuming procedures of Sam’s job aren’t an escape from his past. Hollis (Clifton James), mayor, retired sheriff and former right-hand-man to Wade seems fit to bursting with guilt and secrets from the moment we first hear him talking about the night Charley Wade went missing. Minnie Bledsoe (Beatrice Winde) is another standout as the widow of Roderick (Randy Stripling), previous owner of the nightclub. She calls Sam “Sheriff Junior” dismissively and he responds with “yeah, that’s the story of my life.” Here is yet another person in Rio County whose present is still shaped by the ghosts of Buddy Deeds and Charley Wade. Minnie at least has her grandson’s GameBoy as a distraction.
Sayles even uses his scene staging to show the past and the present at odds. Instead of a traditional method to signify a flashback (a wipe, chimes, maybe black-and-white), the past and present exist in the same frame in Lone Star. In one scene, we see Buddy, Hollis, and Wade (20 years ago) on the dance floor of the nightclub, and the camera pans to the bar, where Otis and Sam stand (present-day). Or we see Pilar and Sam (fortysomething, present) at the river’s edge, and without cutting the camera pans to the same two characters (high-school-aged, past) at the same location. We intuit that the past and present coexist within the same frame and same world, but they do not coexist peacefully. In a third flashback, Mercedes watches her younger self on her journey across the river, which motivates her to help a lady who was (in the present) injured in the same crossing.
Sayles is fond of using in-shot transitions between characters in his interweaving storylines. City of Hope (1991) does this frequently, usually with a character leaving a scene and new ones walking into the shot. He does this less frequently in Sunshine State (2002) and Silver City (2004), but it does seem to be a favorite trick. However, only in Lone Star does this trick shift focus on the same character and same location but at different times.
Sam’s past is in focus again when he stops by his ex-wife Bunny’s house (Frances McDormand) to pick up boxes of his old stuff. We can’t help but contrast Sam’s past and present because of how different this environment is from the rest of the movie. His house back in Frontera is shown briefly in a scene with Pilar, and it looks like a working class bachelor lives there (bare walls, record player). Bunny’s house is all shiny glass and big screens and overstuffed sofas and bright white carpet. It would seem that Sam married into a wealthy family (there is mention of box seats at football games), and that he gave it up to go back to Rio County when he became sheriff. Chris Cooper plays the scene well, showing Sam reluctant to engage with Bunny. It might be fear that his emotions will get the best of him, or sadness and disgust at how his past self lived, or maybe a little regret that he valued his father’s legacy more than his marriage. Bunny’s laser focus on the life-cycle of football in Texas (she talks high school prospects, college teams, and the Cowboys) almost seems like a quirk or a bit of atmosphere, but I wonder if she is another character who can’t escape the past.
Whatever the conflicting emotion we see in Sam’s face while at Bunny’s house, this interlude nets him some of his father’s old files, and we get that most iconic of windows into the past, a handwritten letter. This letter was from Mercedes to Buddy, and is the final clue for Sam to realize the secret connection between himself and Pilar. In another scene, a trip across the border unearths another ghost, as he learns how Mercedes’ husband was killed. He was shot to death by Wade while helping people cross the border. This realization doesn’t explicitly change anything in the lives of our main characters, but it does give the audience understanding of how Mercedes and Buddy ended up in an affair. Mercedes’ husband was indeed murdered, and Buddy represented safety, especially once he became sheriff (that he looked like 1990s Matthew McConaughey didn’t hurt anything). I like how Sayles gives us these scenes in Lone Star that provide shading to the characters and flesh out the world, as who killed Charley Wade ultimately isn’t that important. Charley Wade’s death let the previous generation enjoy a few decades of relative peace, and his corpse’s discovery threatens that peace.
Lone Star is a film in which Sam Deeds, a fortysomething sheriff of a small South Texas county, must literally and symbolically sift through the past and the sins of his father’s generation in order to find truth and closure. Who killed Sheriff Charley Wade? Was it Sam’s sainted father, the man who benefited the most from the absence of the extorting, murderous Wade? Did his father also engage in some grift to finance his mistress Mercedes’ restaurant (thereby also supporting his secret daughter, Pilar)? Did Otis distance himself from his wife and son Delmore to protect them from the fallout of a murdered sheriff… fallout that never came?
The realization across all the storylines in Lone Star is that one can dig up the past, but by god, bury it again and move on. Otis and Delmore take steps toward reconciliation. Pilar makes peace with her mother. Sam ultimately decides to let people keep assuming that Buddy Deeds killed Charley Wade rather than dredge up the past any further. And he and Pilar resolve to stay together despite what they learned about her parentage. As the film closes, the past is staying buried: the present has finally won.