Far more than a crime story, Lone Star is a mood. Lone Star evokes the secrets of a society of racism and chauvinism; it conjures up unwanted ghosts, histories that are known to all but intentionally forgotten or ignored. The past haunts the present, but the present is also connected with the possibility of a future.
Even though some sentimental moments could have been removed from the film (hey, John Sayles wrote the script for Dolph Lundgren's masterpiece Men of War), this is mostly a good film, perhaps because of the way it deals with historical continuity. The story unfolds in fluid camera movements, which augments the sense of continuity in a very nice way. Flashbacks have a tendency to present things every intelligent viewer could work out in her own mind, but here, there are moments where flashbacks are used without a feeling of redundance. This has everything to do with how the film treats its subject: racism. The past is a part of the lives of the people in the film, the difficulties they have, a community of segregation and transgressions. The film is set in small town in the south, by the Mexican border. A human skull is found. But unlike the progression of most conventional movies, this initial scene does not function as an instigation of a mystery. Rather than offering us a puzzle, Sayles is interested in the psychosocial dynamics of the town and its residents. What I appreciate about Lone Star is its refusal of overstatements. Although Sayles investigates difficult social issues, he sets out to map them, rather than mine the landscape for emotional thrills. In the hands of a less talented director, the script for this film could have been a piece of sensationalist trash.
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