This is just the entry gate to Sayles’s epic. As in his 1991 “City of Hope,” Sayles weaves a dense, novelistic fabric that follows at least 10 major characters and scads of vividly evoked minor parts, revealing with an almost Dickensian largesse the interconnections that bind and divide this racially and ethnically fraught town. Thedirector slides startlingly into his flashbacks, mixing past and present as if erasing the distinction between the two. His point is clear: we carry our history within us, our past always in our present. The question that all his characters are grappling with in this tale of fathers and sons, daughters and mothers, is how to move on, to transcend the trap of history?
It’s a question Sam must face when he rekindles his romance with Pilar Cruz (Elizabeth Pena), his childhood sweetheart. She’s now a widow, a mother and a highschool teacher involved in her own battles over whose version of Texas history will be taught. The past weighs heavily on Pilar’s mother (Miriam Colon), a successful businesswoman who wants to distance herself from her Mexican roots-she insists that only English be spoken in her presence. For Delmore Payne (Joe Morton), the tightly wound black commander of the local military base, returning to the town he fled involves a painful confrontation with his father, Otis (Ron Canada), who abandoned him as a child.
Sayles invests all his characters with depths and nuances increasingly rare in American movies. He takes his sweet time laying out his themes and disclosing his secrets, but if the storytelling sometimes threatens to become languid the diversions serve a purpose. The payoff comes at the end, when the myriad threads pull together with a shock like a noose tightening around your neck. Built with old-fashioned craftsmanship, “Lone Star” is not a movie you’ll quickly forget. It may not dazzle you with its flash, but it has more on its mind than all the summer wouldbe blockbusters put together.
