OVP: Lone Star (1996)

Film: Lone Star (1996)

Stars: Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Pena, Kris Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey, Miriam Colon, Frances McDormand

Director: John Sayles

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Kris Kristofferson: click here to learn more about Mr. Kristofferson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned last week, Kris Kristofferson's acting career never really recovered after the failure of Heaven's Gate, and he spent much of the 1980's alternating between forgettable movies like Songwriter and Trouble in Mind (the latter being a well-reviewed neo-noir that made zilch at the box office and is definitely going on my Letterboxd Watchlist as that feels up my alley) while having more success in music, forming the supergroup Highwaymen with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, & Waylon Jennings.  By the end of the decade, he had moved to a point where he was playing second fiddle to Paul Reubens in Big Top Pee-wee (which didn't even have the good sense to be a hit like its predecessor).  But in the 1990's, Kristofferson starred in his last important film, and appropriately enough, it's a western to close our series.  Made by noted independent filmmaker John Sayles, Lone Star was a modest hit in 1996, and a critical gem that has only grown in stature in the years that followed.  Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, while Kristofferson has worked for decades since, it feels a good way to close his career, and our fifth season of Saturdays with the Stars.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie alternates between two different time frames, focusing on a father-and-son, both of whom are lawmen in the border community of Frontera, Texas.  The son is Sam Deeds (Cooper), who is investigating the appearance of a dead body in the desert, which we learn after a while is the skeleton of Charlie Wade (Kristofferson), a corrupt sheriff who decades earlier disappeared, and was succeeded by Buddy Deeds (McConaughey), who would become famous for his straight-laced and honest approach to his work, reshaping the town for the better.  Sam has a complicated relationship with his father, who was a womanizer & not a strong father figure, and we also learn more about Sam's romantic life, including meeting his troubled ex-wife Bunny (McDormand) and watch as he embarks on a relationship with Pilar (Pena), a girl he loved in his youth but both of their parents wanted to keep them apart.  It turns out they did so with good reason, with two secrets leaking in the waning moments of the film.  We find that not only did Buddy help with the coverup of Charlie's death (he had been killed in a form of self-defense when he was going to kill an innocent man & say it was for "resisting arrest"), but we also learn that Buddy is Pilar's father, having had an affair with her mother years earlier.  In an inversion of the plot of Chinatown, which the film bares a strong resemblance toward, Sam & Pilar decide that, since she can no longer have children, that they should continue to see each other even though they are half-siblings.

Lone Star is the sort of difficult, cerebral film that could only be a hit because it's good, and that's the case.  We see a lot of the tropes of the west that we saw throughout this year-the honorable lawman, the tough-as-nails woman who survives in a world that wants to tear her down, and the corruption of the system in the form of Kristofferson's Wade, holding the West back from modernity.  But it also looks beyond that, which makes it interesting.  Much of the modern scenes with Cooper's Sam talk about the ways that the racism that happened during Wade's reign-of-terror was substituted for a "they're replacing us" mentality.  We get a number of moments where we understand the politics of this community will continue to give more power to the growing Latino population, and even Sam is likely to lose his position as Sheriff soon because a Latino lawman will be elected to replace him.  It's a fascinating dichotomy here that was usually ignored in the Western, where we knew that white men would ultimately control all of the power over the Native American populations they're fighting with, the ones that originally held these lands.  Lone Star smartly talks about how, eventually, the West will always be made by those who come to it, and no one holds sway there forever.

And that ends both our month with Kris Kristofferson and our season of "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood."  Kristofferson is still alive, and in the decades after Lone Star made films, though almost all of them supporting roles in lukewarm franchises like Blade and Dolphin Tale.  The western continues to survive, and every few years pops up with another classic like Brokeback Mountain, No Country for Old Men, Gran Torino, and The Power of the Dog, with Yellowstone the closest it's come to consistent mainstream success in television.  As I mentioned last week, we'll start our new series looking at the concept of America's Sweetheart through twelve actresses who embodied that title in the 20th Century, but tomorrow we'll have a proper sendoff to our season with one last cattle call of the best of our twelve western stars this year!