Film Analysis: Lone Star - Movie Review Example

Film Analysis: "Lone Star" 2008 John Sayles describes his 1996 film Lone Star, as "a story about borders." It is set in Texas, that, Sayles says, is unique in the United States in the sense that the hot and gory events did not end with the Civil War but a "racial and ethnic war" has had lingering effects on the border between Texas and Mexico. But this physical frontier is only one side of the film's interest with borderlines. "In a personal sense," Sayles remarks in an interview (1996), "a border is where you draw a line and say 'This is where I end and somebody else begins.' In a metaphorical sense, it can be any of the symbols that we erect between one another -- sex, class, race, age."(West and West, Borders and Boundaries). Lone Star depicts a group of people with its disputes and social undercurrents.On the face of it, it is a murder mystry story delving into interpersonal and interracial conflicts in Frontera', Rio County, Texas. It has many sub plots and levels-- alienated father, annoyed son, misread son of the fuming father, love between two teenagers that gets revived and there's the your -father- was-justice-embodied and your mother was a saint" plot of the adored past sheriff Buddy Dees (Matthew McConaughey) and the evil sheriff Charlie Wade. The present sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) is the son of the former sheriff who somewhat, lives in the shadow of his late father is summoned to inquire about a 40-year-old skeleton found in the desert. As Sam dip deeper into the town's mysterious secrets, he learns more about his father, who replaced the corrupt Charlie Wade. As Sam solves the long-past events bounding the skeleton, he also yearns to revive a romance with his first love, a beautiful Hispanic girl, Pilar Cruz (Elizabeth Pea) whom Buddy categorically barred him to see during his adolescent years. Sam did not gel with his father in those years. Story goes that Buddy Deeds, when was just sheriff a Charlie Wade's deputy, killed the shady and cruel sheriff. When Wade's corpse is found in the desert, Sam finds himself probing his father when he gradually finds the story from the point of view of the town's older residents including a local bar owner, Pilar's mother and the former mayor and comes to know of his father in another light that directly affects his own life. However, the film is essentially about how local residents handle the difficult, often brutal history they have succeeded to and the borders they must traverse to live in peace Mise-en-scene Sayles still reigns supreme on his films right from production and casting control to finally the last cut. "The fact is," he explained, "I've got to the point where I don't need to make movies. . . . Why give up a year of your life for a film you are going to apologise for and you really don't feel is yours" Sayles's films are, clearly, his own. With his unquestionable honesty e and his rank as doyen of American independents, he can afford to shrug at studio support with or without which his best work may yet be to come (kemp, Sight and Sound). In Lone Star, John Sayles, like in his in City of Hope depicts a community with its in-fights and nuances though his signature shot: a long uninteruppted take wandering from group to group, jumping back to link all of them. But halfway , Sayles picks up his three main characters out of this busy backdrop and drops them into unique trouble to play out a tense psychological drama. Lone Star, a decisive film in Sayles' directorial quests (the screenplay was nominated for an Oscar) is a narrative of borders of all kinds facing the anathema of race mixing and even incest. Texas is a melting pot where Anglo, Indigenous-American, African-American and Hispanic townsfolk ponder about the differing patrimony of these parched and sandy plains. Sayles' camera in its typical easy changeovers between past and present from frame to frame tosses an obdurate attention on a region that has flourished on a misleadingly particular fable. In an interview with the Cineaste Sayles asserts, history being a central theme of Lone Star, in an evident conclusion because there's "not even the separation of a dissolve, which is a soft cut", the purpose of a cut or a dissolve is to say, that there is a a border with antagonistic view he wanted to remove that border, he says, show that people are still living in the past. Pilar is a history teacher with a purpose (West and West . 1996). This is the first feature that the director has shot in Super 35mm to just look in a "different way" as Sayles put it : "One of the things we wanted to do in Lone Star was to show the horizontal look of the border. It's not mountainous, it is a very long, absolutely flat horizon line, and we wanted, at least in the beginning of the picture, to isolate people in that flat, wide land. It takes about a county's worth of acres to raise a hundred head of cattle down there, and widescreen gave us that feeling of just a few people fighting over that little thin strip of river where the good land is and which is surrounded by scrubby desert. Super 35mm is just a different way to get a widescreen look where you use regular lenses, but because you use more of the frame, you don't have to hang quite as much light. Making an ambitious movie on a lowget, you have to move a little faster" (as cited in West and West , Borders and Boundaries). Narrative and point of view One must keep in mind that before getting underway out as a director, Sayles was well-known both as a novelist who provided sharp, erudite scripts for genre movies-Alligator, The Howling, The Lady in Red where he skillfully brought in sharp touches of political parable. His own films, though, have shunned general formulae, remaining fresh and unusually capricious with an academic pursuit. Not that Sayles is interested in littering his films with insinuating erudite references. "I want people to leave the theater thinking about their own lives, not about other movies," he said in the interview. His work draws its elegance from his social implicates, from his building a character as a product of historical and cultural effects, from his sharp ear for conversation and his insight into the political affairs. The incompatible young couple of Baby It's You are no less limited by the pressures of their class and surroundings (settlement in 1960s New Jersey) than the West Virginian miners of Matewan, the baseball professionals of Eight Men Out, or the aggressive urban groups of City of Hope (Armstrong, sensesofcinema.com). As a director, Sayles has gradually widened and stepped up his personal ideas taking risks. Lone Star, his most adept film so far, is also his most descriptively multifaceted film, interlacing a dozen plots and subplots. His films that remains at the flashpoint of culture and politics, prefer group over stars, contact over sense, studying characters and ideas over picturesque values or technological virtuoso. "I don't regard anything I do as art. That's a foreign world to me. I regard it as a conversation. Very often in a conversation, you tell a story to illustrate something you think or feel," Sayles has asserted (as cited in Kemp, Sight and Sound). But Sayles is no rigid believer of objective observation instead of psychoanalysis. People in his films can be injured by life, forced together in spiky closeness, manipulated to surpass their milieu and reach a cautious friendship (as we have seen in Passion Fish). Racial and social training are commanding influences, but do not stay at the top. In a scene from Lone Star, Otis Payne, the local bar owner and self-professed historian goes with his grandson to the "Black Seminole Museum" near his bar. The history in his museum tells the story of past slaves and shares stories about social life in the land of Florida and of their struggles against tyranny in a place called Texas. Their visit in the museum is the first between the young man and his true past. As his grandson is surprised to learn that he is part indigenous Indian, Otis promptly checks his grandson's interest by warning the young boy, "But blood only means what you let it." In today's United States groups that promotes for the cultural integration of America's immigrant groups into an adequately "American" culture function from the basis that people can opt their access to their bloodline. Even those who function within the enormous region between integration and cultural nationalism assert the idea that people have the power to opt the attitude they have for their own histories. In the last two decades, culture has become flooded with messages the philosophy of self-help to make the Americans more and more believe that all they have to do is to wish hard so as to make them set free from the limits of their past, their genetics, or their memory. In Lone Star John Sayles interlaces stories of other people's lives, y also dealing with issues of history. Sayles uses this montage of lives to depict the role played by many intricate levels of history and in so doing, the film reaches at conclusions which contradict the typically held ideas about the nature of history, and showing how the knowledge of history functions in human lives, and how humans can rise above their own history (Sandoval, 1996). The final words of Lone Star are "Forget the Alamo." Along the Tex-Mex border which, as Sam Deeds remarks with terse irony, "has seen a good number of disagreements over the years." Here the past weighs heavy to warp relationships between individuals, generations, and whole communities. "All that stuff, that history-the hell with it, right," says Pilar, intending to escape from past guilt and hostilities to start it all over again. According to John Sayles, the film is "about history and what we do with it. Do we use it to hit each other Is it something that drags us down . . . At what point do you say about your parents, 'That was them, this is me"' Even so, the expression, "Forget the Alamo"(the expression standing opposite to the old slogan saying, "Remember to the battle at Alamo, seen by the Mexicans as part of Texas's larger fight for freedom from Mexico, in a different way than the Americans for whom those killed at the Alamo are heroes.) shouldn't be taken too mechanically . Neither Pilar is implying anything as coarse as just discarding the past even if that had been possible or that John Sayles gives no importance to history. In order to surpass history he contends, we must first know what history is all about. Luckily for the history profession, in order to forget the Alamo you have to know it. Second, by using seemingly objective events such as the shooting of Charley Wade and the kinship of Pilar and Sam to communicate an ideal of the relativity of history and truth, Sayles doesn't leave us in a world of uncertain knowledge. Rather, he appropriately destroys a world of borders. Lone Star asserts that there is no "border" between the past and the present, no "border" between the factual and factual reading of the past. We only choose to use them for our own invented history. The citizens of Frontera, Texas are united by their shared histories, on the land that belong to all of them. The final scene of Lone Star finds Pilar and Sam facing am empty screen. They have accepted the past and yet opted to live outside of it. They are relaxed in the unsettled future. The theme of Lone Star has emphasized all Sayles's work so far: the way people are shaped by their cultural milieu but can rise above it if they try hard (Kemp, Sight and Sond,). It is question of choosing one's identity as a conscious individual. Lone Star also departs from the typical icons of Mexican man and woman in its inherent conflict and interface between the Anglos and the Mexicans at least in Texas during the 1990's, where the typical male Anglo is depicted as a "hard-drinking, hard-riding, straight-shooting cowboy", generally tall, burly, lean, handsome, and white to be sure-the type the Hollywood films used to project, John Wayne being the lead among the. The fat, sloppy, dark, mustachioed and often drunk, deceitful Mexican is politically at odds with the Americans and we naturally now know this is the Mexican that would find his comfortable niche in lone Star. Sayles Lone Star uses the relation between Sam and Pilar as a metaphor for the resolution of the historical hesitation that exist between the Anglo-American and Mexican interface. To do that he even subvert those systems of social values that support the crossing point. Lone Star modifies a Southern cultural narrative where incest and racial mixing, sex taboos, inconsistently enrich each other. By educating his audience to associate the two taboos and to treat the bans as capacious and illogical, John Sayles not only salvage racial intermixing as a sexual option but also intentionally sanctions incest. Lone Star shows how a community whose history is soaked in violence, such as the US, should look for ways to handle its problematical cultural memory. An abstract chord of love, justice, and tragedy used to interpret the film's last line, 'Forget the Alamo.' is concluded where the memory of a disturbed past can only function to become accountable to public life when the Americans, like the characters in Lone Star, opt to remember with an empathy freeing both their forefathers and themselves so play out the roles of hero or villain (Limon, 'Tex-sex-mex). Works Cited West , Dennis , West , Joan M., Borders and Boundaries: An Interview with John Sayles, Cineaste v22, n3 , Summer, 1996, retrieved from http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/sayles.html Armstrong, Richard, John Sayles, Senses of Cinema, retrieved from http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/04/sayles.htm Lone Star DVD1996, Director: John Sayles; Production: Columbia Pictures; color, 35 mm, Panavision; running time: 135 minutes; length: 3781 meters. Filmed in Eagle Pass, Texas. Cost: $5 million. Producer: R. Paul Miller, Maggie Renzi, John Sloss (executive), Jan Foster (associate); screenplay: John Sayles; cinematograper: Stuart Dryburgh; editor: John Sayles; music: Mason Daring; casting: Avy Kaufman; production design: Dan Bishop; art direction: J. Kyler Black; set decoration: Dianna Freas; costume design: Shay Cunliffe Cast: Stephen Mendillo ( Cliff ); Stephen J. Lang ( Mikey ); Chris Cooper ( Sam Deeds ); Elizabeth Peña ( Pilar Cruz ); Oni Faida Lampley ( Celie ); Eleese Lester ( Molly ); Joe Stevens ( Deputy Travis ); Gonzalo Castillo ( Amado ); Richard Coca ( Enrique ); Clifton James ( Mayor Hollis Pogue ); Tony Frank ( Fenton ); Miriam Colon ( Mercedes Cruz ); Kris Kristofferson ( Sheriff Charlie Wade ); Jeff Monahan ( Young Hollis ); Matthew McConaughey ( Buddy Deeds ); Frances McDormand ( Bunny ); and others. Jose E. Limon, 'Tex-sex-mex: American identities, Lone Star, and the politics of racialised sexuality, ' in American Literary History, vol.9, no3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 598- Sandoval, Toms, The Burden Of History and John Sayles' Lone Star, 28, October 1996, retrieved from http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1996/28/sandoval.html Read More