Lone Star explores the themes of resentments and secrets of the past that distort relationships between individuals, generations, and whole communities.Through Buddy and Sam Deeds, Otis and Demore Payne, and Mercedes and Pilar Cruz, the film depicts how the past divides fathers and sons and mothers and daughters, affecting the course of their lives.[4] It also explores how legends are used to obscure inconvenient truths. Sam Deeds finds that the father he despises is neither as bad as he has always believed him to be, nor as good as his burdensome legend depicts.[5] On both the personal and ethnic level the film depicts how history creates legends and borders magnify artificial divisions among populations and countries.
Megan Ratner, in an article in Filmmaker Magazine[5] that includes an interview with John Sayles writes:
“In Lone Star, [John Sayles] plays with detective and western film conventions (no one particularly wants Sam to solve the murder, and his interest centers on undermining the town mythology rather than upholding it) to prod notions of good guys and bad guys, of history and legend - and ultimately of America itself.”
In this interview, John Sayles states: “…the story and the border were intertwined. I see that whole area and its cultures as this kind of dysfunctional family. There are all these secrets that go way, way, back. It didn't used to matter what side of the river you were on, but now it's a big deal because of something totally artificial that somebody did. I was thinking about what's sometimes called revisionist history. This country was never just one culture; it was a whole bunch of cultures. Being a country is something that you manufacture. And there's some choice involved. It wasn't inevitable; there was a lot of struggling and killing involved.”
“‘It's in every relationship - racial history, personal history. In all of those histories, you have that question of - how much do I want to carry this? Is [the history] good, or is it possible to say, ‘I'm going to start from scratch? Do I still live my life in reaction to - for or against - my father?’"
The Criterion Collection listing for the film states:
“A keen observer of America’s social fabric, writer-director John Sayles uncovers the haunted past buried beneath a small Texas border town in this sprawling neowestern mystery. When a skeleton is discovered in the desert, lawman Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), son of a legendary local sheriff, begins an investigation that will have profound implications both for him personally and for all of Rio County, a place still reckoning with its history of racial violence. Sayles’s masterful film—novelistic in its intricacy and featuring a brilliant ensemble cast, including Joe Morton, Elizabeth Peña, and Kris Kristofferson—quietly subverts national mythmaking and lays bare the fault lines of life at the border.”
