Lone Star

Lone Star (1996), directed by John Sayles

It's no great challenge to put together multiple plots in a film: any disaster film worth its salt can throw together a half-dozen half-baked stories. It takes a truly talented director to tie the stories thematically, to make them all "click." Robert Altman can do it. George Lucas did it in American Graffiti. In Lone Star, John Sayles does it.

Lone Star is the story of a Texas county on the Mexican border. One day, a 40-year-old skeleton is discovered, the body of a tyrannical sheriff (Kris Kristofferson). The current sheriff (Chris Cooper) thinks that his father, a legendary local figure and previous sheriff (Matthew McConaughey) may have killed him.

That is the basic plot. But we also meet a military officer estranged from both his father and his son; a schoolteacher who tries to discipline her son and rekindle a relationship long extinguished; and a restaurant owner who tries to blot out her past. Eventually, several of these stories come together in a remarkable (and surprising) resolution. We finally learn that the film is about reconciliation.

Based on his ability to juggle different plots and exotic locales, it seems Sayles would be the perfect director for a Confederacy of Dunces movie (if one is ever made). And based on both this and The Secret of Roan Inish, it seems clear that Sayles is the master of the flashback. Never have past and present events been so seamlessly welded together.

Lone Star is a magnificent movie, both enthralling and moving. I haven't seen every movie of 1996 (who has?), but I fell safe in proclaiming Lone Star as the best of the year, and one of the greatest movies of the 1990's.