In the desert near the Texan frontier town Frontera, a forty-year-old corpse is found. Sheriff Sam Deeds soon suspects it is the corrupt sheriff Charlie Wade who disappeared without trace all those years before. Deeds father, who was sheriff for fifteen years after Wade’s disappearance, is a kind of legend in town. Yet Sam Deeds has less positive memories of his father and suspects him of the murder. He goes to ask his old friends and colleagues, but most do not feel like revising their memories.Sayles constructs a subtle and complex pattern of overlapping stories around this murder mystery. For instance there is the recently-appointed black commander of the army base who has his roots in Frontera and the Mexican-American schoolteacher Pilar who is investigating the past. Sayles is interested in characters like this who often have a very different view of old and new events from their various angles.Sayles has earlier provided a beautiful portrait of a political, ethnographic and psychological urban landscape in City of Hope. In Lone Star he manages, probably better than ever, to make the complexity of life in a small border town tangible. The film was shot by Stuart Dryburgh, who earlier did e.g. The Piano and Once Were Warriors. The cast, including many actors who had earlier worked for Sayles, is excellent.
