Lone Star embodies both
simplicity and complexity. With quiet, watchful, and soft-spoken intelligence,
director John Sayles displays broad social and political awareness, without
ever losing sight of the human scale. He focuses on macro-political issues that
he intertwines with the personal, demonstrating how universal concerns affect
the lives of ordinary individuals.
At
some point during the first act of the film, a scene seemingly unrelated to the
rest of the movie takes up a considerable amount of screen time. This is a
school meeting where disgruntled parents argue about which textbook would be
more appropriate for their children’s history class. Pilar (Elizabeth Pena),
the teacher, is desperately trying to appease them by explaining that all she
was trying to do was present her students with a more complete picture. “Now
that’s what’s gotta stop,” a concerned mother blurts out. What they are
actually arguing about in the racially diverse and intolerant small town is whose version of history they should
cover. And everyone in Rio County seems to remember the past a bit differently.
The director is also bent on showing us, the viewers, the complete picture in
this multi-layered narrative of the present and past of this disjointed community,
from multiple points of view. Brief, meaningful encounters like this make up
the movie, which plunges us directly into the action and lets us figure out on
our own exactly how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Like Citizen Kane, Lone Star brings us closer to the truth through each vignette,
while Sam (Chris Cooper) acts as our go-between, our guide.
Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini’s directorial debut takes its title from the English derivation of Janus,
the two-faced Roman god who stands at the cusp of the new year, simultaneously
musing backward at recent lessons and experiences, and peering forward to the
murky and elusive future ahead, a guardian at the crossroads of the past and
present. The reference implies the twin forces of duplicity and shifting
circumstances that swirl in the fragrant atmosphere of The Two Faces of January, an old-school, sly, seductive Southern
Europe-set tale of moral compromise and misdirection. Based on the Patricia Highsmith
novel of the same name, Amini’s film has its own two faces; it’s at once an
involving character drama and a gripping suspense movie, a pleasurable period piece
of precision and class and a tight and tidy thriller as shrewd, sleek, and
scintillating as its characters.
