Lone Star.

Lone Star is John Sayles's latest exploration of The Way We Live Now. One of the very few filmmakers to have won significant literary recognition (he's received the National Book Award and a MacArthur "genius" grant), Sayles brings a novelist's appetite for texture and characterization to his movie work. In his films, voices aren't drowned by gunfire. His storytelling is patient, thorough, sometimes even tentative. And, like the best novelists, he aspires to extend the reach of his understanding by trying to get under the skin of those different from himself: Latinos, blacks, homosexuals, the very young, the very old, the poor, the rich, all kinds of women. With Sayles, this is never PC dutifulness but Shakespearean curiosity. If America had such a Japanese institution as National Living Treasure, Sayles would be the only current filmmaker deserving of the title.

But the defects of his virtues are nearly always as vividly on display as the virtues themselves, and I often steal away from a Sayles film feeling crushed by a sense of my own ingratitude. I certainly wasn't bored by Lone Star, for most of it is both good entertainment and insightful social commentary, but the old defects are still there in force. It is the best of Sayles; it is the worst of Sayles.

The plot of Lone Star is the stuff of melodrama, but Sayles, of course, uses it only to explore the life of a Texas border town. A decades-old skeleton is found in the middle of scrub flats. Sheriff Sam Deeds soon determines that the remains are of a vicious predecessor of his, Wade, a lawman of the fifties, merciless to Mexicans and blacks, a taker of bribes, a master of extortion. (Wade's depredations are extensively portrayed in flashbacks, so the dead man is one of the more important characters in the movie.) On the night of his disappearance, Wade had been denounced and faced down in public by his own deputy, Sam's father, Buddy. Did Buddy Deeds, fearing Wade's retribution and coveting his job, murder his boss? Whether he did or not, Buddy went on to become a decent sheriff: tough, not above political manipulations but basically honest, well respected by Anglo, Hispanic, and black members of the community. Now his son and successor, Sam, must pursue an investigation that might destroy the dead father's reputation. Further complicating his feelings is the grudge he has long harbored against Deeds senior for terminating the teenaged Sam's courtship of a Mexican-American girl. While pursuing his investigation, our hero resumes that love affair after a twenty-year hiatus, and the solution of the mystery casts that affair, and Buddy's old opposition to it, in a radically different light.

The real substance of this movie is neither the detective work nor Sam's psychological turmoil but the reactions and reflections of the people he has to interview. It is these exchanges that reveal the racial and class tensions of the Southwest and the barriers and bonds built up in a border town by more than two centuries of troubled Texas history.

As usual, Sayles makes his cast of characters as inclusive as possible. There is the Mexican-American community of teachers, merchants, deputies, a reporter with an axe to grind. Anglos are represented by politicians, businessmen, concerned parents, a frazzled divorcee, soldiers from a nearby army base, Sam himself. There are black house-wives, a bar owner, the army post's commander and his family. And there is one lone Indian--a wry seller of novelties at a roadside stand. This makes the canvas of Lone Star very full and rich.

But also exasperatingly crowded. As in Sayles's City of Hope, there are more dramatis personae here than the story can cope with. In the case of the black characters, the role of the saloon owner, Big O, is very securely placed within the plot: his peculiar situation, a covert alliance with whites he wouldn't normally conspire with, was brought on by his youthful defiance of the monstrous Sheriff Wade. But the estranged son and grandson of Big O are laboriously shoehorned into the story so that Sayles can explore the tensions within black middle-class families, a subject that needs a movie unto itself. (Of course, the strains between the black fathers and sons parallel Sam's troubles with his father, but why is such a parallel needed in this already complicated scenario?) Though Sam's interview with the Native American vendor is flavorsomely written and acted, the only vital piece of information it adds to the story should have come from one of Buddy's fellow cops or from one of the Mexican-American townspeople, since it concerns Buddy's romantic involvement with a Hispanic. Apparently Sayles decided that any story of the Southwest must have an Indian in it and proceeded to stuff in just one more character. But good sociology doesn't necessarily make for good storytelling.

However, Sayles goes beyond sociology in his dialogue and casting and directing of actors. Time and again, he finds the right phrase to either skewer or enliven a character. When a Mexican-American history teacher, confronting a school board exasperated by her efforts to present the Mexican side of Texas history, pleads, "We're presenting a more complete picture," an Anglo mother snaps, "And that's what's got to stop!" At the unveiling of a tribute to Buddy Deeds, a corny sculpture showing the late sheriff placing a paternal hand on the shoulder of a pathetic Chicano waif, a couple of geezers remark, "It does look like old Buddy." "Yeah, I think he's gonna run that Mexican kid in for loitering."

Sayles has always had a problem with pacing. Every scene tends to be andante, rarely largo, never presto. I sometimes get the feeling that Sayles watches his characters with the maddening patience of a cud-chewing cow. And though I'm glad that he dares to let his plots ramify in a novelistic fashion, continuing to do so in the final half-hour is a strategy fatal to the most generous of attention-spans. A reader can put a novel down long enough to renew patience and digest new subject matter. But movies shorter than Spartacus don't have intermissions. (Sayles's movies probably benefit from being viewed in video format.)

The same problem mars Lone Star. But to see how the excellence of an individual scene can mitigate defective overall pacing, witness the visit of Sam to his ex-wife Bunny, whose garage holds certain documents that will solve the mystery. This scene is in Lone Star's final twenty minutes, just when the filmmaker should be homing in on his conclusion and the explanation of the murder. Instead, Sayles stops the story so that we can get acquainted with Bunny and her quirks (drugs, sports mania, Oedipal fixation) and realize how wise Sam was to leave her and get on with his life. This should have sunk Lone Star, but so shrewd are dialogue and direction and so captivating is Frances McDormand's toothy, giggle-eyed rendering of Bunny that we stay with the scene even as an exasperated voice in the back of one's skull may be whining, "Hey, when are we going to find out who shot the sheriff?"

In fact, there has never been a better acted John Sayles movie, and that's saying a lot since he has long worked deftly with players. Here, only Elizabeth Pena, as Deeds's former and future lover, fails to deliver; she seems to stand outside her role instead of inhabiting it. But Miriam Colon is perfect as her mother, all fury and flounce but capable of compassion. Clifton James achieves exactly the right ambiguity as the mayor, keeping us guessing as to whether his canniness is rooted in greed or wisdom. Ron Canada might have elected to play Big O as a more flamboyant character in the manner of James Earl Jones, but Canada's silkier approach gives us a man weathered, not broken by years of struggle. His girlfriend is played by one of the few true living legends of dance, Carmen de Lavallade, and she is now as eloquent with words and glances as she once was with her body. Joe Morton gives Big O's officer son just proportions of resentment, vulnerability, and military spruceness, all underpinned by irreducible decency. The big casting surprise is that of Kris Kristofferson, Mr. Laid-Back Dude himself, as the monstrous Sheriff Wade. Kristofferson taunts, glowers, and stomps with the requisite repellent gusto.

All would be for nought if the lead actor fizzled. The pitfall of the role is that Sam Deeds is mainly a fact-gatherer and a sounding board rather than a truly interesting protagonist. But Chris Cooper is a master minimalist who can keep your attention just by the way he leans against a car or cocks his head at a suspicious remark. Like an earlier Cooper of the silver screen, this actor makes taciturnity both formidable and reassuring.

The superb cameraman, Stuart Dryburgh, gives Lone Star a memorably sunbaked look, and all the details of art direction seem right--the handles on beer taps are shaped like six-shooters--but the real visual triumph is in Sayles's choreography of camera and players. Just one example: during that school board meeting, everyone at first argues without listening and the camera whips back and forth from one vituperating face to another. Then the history teacher speaks cogently and, with reason getting a momentary hearing, the frenzied camera movement is replaced by calm, conventional editing. But the shouting resumes and so does the jerky back-and-forth panning of the camera. Thus, the filmmaking mimics the rise and fall of civility.

I doubt that Sayles's moviemaking will either improve or deteriorate in subsequent films. The patience that seems an inextricable part of what is commendable in his work would probably be destroyed by a shot of adrenaline. His admirers will have to abide his defects to savor his virtues, which have never been brighter than in Lone Star.