If you want to know why people are scared of cops start with the badges.
Deep in the heart of Texas some random guys find a random skull and assorted items in the desert. Among the items are a ring and a Sheriff’s badge that leads current day Sheriff Sam (Chris Cooper) to surmise it may well be former Sheriff Charlie Wade (a gruff Kris Kristofferson) who went missing decades previous.
Just before Buddy (Matthew McConaughey) – Sam’s Dad – took over the town…
We learn in flashback that Charlie was crooked and not especially liked. More accurately he was hated. He ruled with an iron fist and was rumoured to be apt to violent acts if things weren’t going his way. Buddy on the other hand was by all accounts a good man, and revered by the locals even years after his death.
Sam knew enough about his Father to be dubious of his true qualities, but not enough to shake the confidence of the citizens with the cold truth. Foremost among his suspicions is that it was Buddy who killed Charlie Wade.
Lone Star follows Sam as he conducts his own retrospective investigations of the events decades previous, laying bare a small town with a past of racism, bigotry, corruption and violence, with resentment and regret spanning generations and racial boundaries.
A welcome development in Sam’s research is that he can revisit Pilar (Elizabeth Pena), his childhood sweetheart. And as he nears the truth Sam strives to spend more time with her, despite the obvious conflict it causes Pilar’s mother.
Lone Star is a surprisingly intricate who-dunnit that spans several decades, it seems not only are the locals of Charlie and Buddy’s vintage aware of snippets of truth. Sam’s hunches are pieced together with new information and surprising findings that culminate in a clever twist ending that was ahead of its time – what with The Sixth Sense not released until a few years after this.
Chris Cooper is excellent in the lead role as the lawman with a little too much of his personal life invested in the case to remain impartial, and the large cast is uniformly good also.
I can’t spoil the ending, aside from saying it is well worth hanging around for.
Final Rating – 7.5 / 10. A Fargo-esque effort with all the small town details but none of the quirks. Ironically the kookiest thing in the film is a Frances MacDormand cameo.
