The scene is a parent-teacher meeting in the border town of Frontera, Texas. The Hispanic parents are determined to push their demands for a revisionist approach to teaching Texas history. The Anglos are equally determined to maintain the status quo, to teach what has always been taught about the establishment of the Lone Star state. One particularly outspoken Anglo is quick to dismiss the bitter complaints of a Hispanic activist: "Hey, we stole it fair and square, buddy! Winners get to write the history!"
Pilar Cruz (Elizabeth Pena), a thirtysomething widowed schoolteacher at the center of the conflict, does her best to maintain some degree of civility amid the angry exchanges. But even as the tempers flare all around her, she remains distracted by thoughts about her own personal history.
She can't help thinking about her mother, Mercedes (Miriam Colon), a Mexican-born restaurant owner who has single-mindedly Americanized herself during her many years in Frontera. ("In English!" Mercedes tells a kitchen worker who makes the mistake of speaking in his mother tongue. "This is the United States! We speak English!") And when she isn't thinking about her mother, Pilar is thinking about Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), the Anglo sheriff of Frontera. More than two decades ago, they were high school sweethearts. But her mother disapproved of their relationship. And Sam's father took drastic steps to end the romance.
The past is never very far away from anyone in Lone Star, a richly textured and deeply involving drama about the weight of history and the subjectivity of memory. More important, the film also is about breaking free of the past -- distant and recent, personal and communal -- a rebellion expressed with no little irony when a character announces: "Everything that went before, all that stuff, all that history -- the hell with it, right? Forget the Alamo."
Specifically, Lone Star is a story about several interconnected lives in a Texas town where the sins of fathers continue to haunt their sons, and no one can escape the past without a determined struggle. Bountifully rich in incident and characterization, the film recalls the vast canvas of Sayles' City of Hope, a 1991 blue-collar epic about contemporary urban life. But Lone Star is more intimate, more tightly focused, more emotionally compelling. It may well be Sayles' masterwork. It definitely is the first film of 1996 with a legitimate claim to greatness. During a summer movie season when so much emphasis has been placed on dazzling pyrotechnics and computer-generated magic, Sayles is audacious enough to remind us that the most special effect we can find at the movies is, as always, an intelligent and engrossing story about full-bodied, three-dimensional human beings.
As he has so many times before, Sayles takes great pains in Lone Star to present an all-inclusive overview of the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity in his dramatic landscape. (The film, incidentally, was shot on location in and around Eagle Pass.) Even relatively minor subplots about interracial romances and political maneuverings ring true with precise and persuasive detail. Lone Star may well be the first mainstream American movie to acknowledge that middle-class Hispanics have become a formidable political force in Texas, much to the discomfort of some tradition-bound Anglos. When someone tells Sam Deeds that he may be "the last white sheriff" of Frontera, he merely nods in noncommittal agreement. For him, the diminishment of the Anglo minority's control is neither tragic nor distressing. It simply is an inevitability.
As it turns out, Sam was encouraged to run for sheriff in the first place primarily because the Anglo minority figured he was their last best hope to remain in power. Here, too, the past figures prominently in everyone's considerations: Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), Sam's late father, was the local sheriff for 15 years, and he continues to be revered by most of the townspeople as a legend. (When Sam introduces himself as "Sheriff Deeds" to a longtime Frontera resident, the elderly woman corrects him: "Sheriff Deeds dead, honey. You just Sheriff Junior.") Not surprisingly, Sam remembers the elder Deeds as a far less admirable figure.
The locals still swap stories about the fateful night 40 years ago when Buddy ran his corrupt predecessor, Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson), out of town. No one has seen or heard of Wade since his hasty departure. But everyone remembers him as a racist, murderous despot. Buddy Deeds may have been only slightly less corrupt, but he was a great deal more evenhanded -- and far less vicious -- about exerting his control over Frontera.
When skeletal remains are uncovered at the long abandoned Army firing range near town, Sam investigates. And when he finds a rusty sheriff's badge near the bones, he begins to suspect that there's more to his father's legend than anyone in town has ever suspected.
