LOOK MA, NO SPACE INVADERS!

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

In life the past haunts us. In the movies it has become a throwaway line. No one seems to care anymore how characters reach the pretty pass in which the first reel finds them. No one seems to remember the power of history to grant coherence to chaotic experience.

No one but John Sayles, that is. His Lone Star has become, in limited release, this summer's movie of choice for grownups who still regard intricate narrative and careful characterization as the most treasurable of special effects. There are no explosions here, just a skeleton unearthed from a shallow grave after a 30-year rest. Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), sheriff in Frontera, a Texas border town where even corruption proceeds at a somnolent pace, has reason to believe these to be the earthly remains of a sadistic and crooked predecessor, Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson). He also guesses that his late father Buddy, who succeeded Charley as sheriff but is widely regarded as a saint, may have been Charley's murderer.

That would be all right with Sam, a wry and doleful man with a taste for irony. He's tired of swallowing invidious comparisons between his performance in office and his dad's--especially since he was never that fond of the old man. Besides, he has new business to attend to--the recovery of the long lost love of his adolescence, Pilar, whom the beautiful Elizabeth Pena invests with the most touching vulnerability.

In any case, solving this long-ago crime is more pretext than text in this movie. For the silence of that grave symbolizes a larger and more conspiratorial silence afflicting Frontera. This had its uses at one time, especially as a way of muffling differences between its black, Hispanic and Anglo communities. But Sayles wants us to count the costs of silence too--in the baleful distortions it imposes on the people who keep it, in the damage it eventually does to innocents like Sam and Pilar when they are not let in on the secrets it shrouds. Above all, he wants us to understand that when we deny history we grant it a more disruptive power. Sayles is a meditative storyteller, with a tendency to mute melodrama rather than letting it wail. But he is also one of the few filmmakers still ferreting out the strangeness and anxiety hidden beneath our poses of ordinariness.

--R.S.