San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
TEXAS FILMS
Whether drama, comedy or true crime, these films capture the Lone Star State of mind
You want to start a fight? Ask a room of culture vultures to cite the most “Texas” film ever made.
Fists tighten and eyes narrow when somebody suggests “Reality Bites.” Faces offer mortified incredulity when “Giant” is cast as representative of today’s Texans. And don’t even mention “Urban Cowboy.”
The passion comes out because we care about Texas. And movies. And especially movies about Texas, of which there are many. This weekend, another one joined the long list as “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” hit theaters, the latest in this franchise about the enforcement of drug trafficking across the U.S.Mexico border and into Texas.
That was all we needed to launch a debate about which films best characterize the Lone Star State. Five staffers settled the debate by casting the 50 best “Texas” films ever made.
What makes something a “Texas” movie? Well, it has to be primarily set in Texas — but not necessarily filmed here. It has to characterize the people, way of life or essence of the state. And it has to be a good movie. With that, here’s our list. Feel free to disagree, or offer your own list; just keep it civil.
1. “Hell or High Water”
(2016): Texas writer Taylor Sheridan’s story of two West Texas brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) pushed to bankrobbing criminality to right what they feel is an economic wrong, beautifully captures their sense of flatland desolation and desperation. The movie is directed by Scotland’s David Mackenzie, but it’s suffused with Sheridan’s sense of place as it’s the second film in his trilogy about life in the West (the others are “Sicario” and “Wind River”).
True, there may be too many mountains (it was shot in New Mexico) or oddly short driving distances between far-flung towns, but its laconic spirit is pure Texas. The performances, including those of Jeff Bridges as the lawman on their tail and Gil Birmingham as his deputy, are pitch-perfect, too.
Notable Texas moment: When the brothers rob a bank and find they aren’t the only ones who are armed.
Cary Darling
2. “The Last Picture Show” (1971): The shorthand assess- ment of Peter Bogdanovich’s adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s 1966 novel is that nothing happens in this story about a town withering on a dying vine. On the contrary, quite a bit happens as Bogdanovich masterfully conveyed the suppressed emotions and aspirations of the inhabitants of Anarene in a piece of lush, black-and-white cinema.
For those who require bombast, “The Last Picture Show” will come across as muted. But the characters (McMurtry cowrote the screenplay with Bogdanovich) are so richly detailed that a single narrative fissure becomes part of a larger web of cracks that affects multiple characters, just as you’d expect in a tiny town. The film teeters between melancholy and fatalism as it tiptoes toward its title, a screening of the John Wayne classic “Red River.”
Notable Texas moment: The Ben Johnson fishing monologue: “I reckon the reason why I always drag you out here is probably I’m just as sentimental as the next feller when it comes to old times. Old times.”
Andrew Dansby
3. “Bernie” (2011): If the two types of story are “man goes on a journey” and “stranger comes to town,” Richard Linklater’s film is clearly the latter, with an emphasis on the strange. “Bernie” doesn’t lend itself to easy categorization, which is part of its charm as a hybrid of true crime, black comedy, small-
town legal drama and documentary. Linklater wrote the film with Skip Hollandsworth, whose Texas Monthly reporting told the story of a theatrical mortician who befriended a feral but wealthy widow, only to shoot her and stuff her into a deep freeze. The town of Carthage would likely have preferred the story to fade, but Jack Black’s fittingly hammy presentation of Bernie Tiede and Linklater’s judgment-free presentation of his crime made for gold. Notable Texas moment: This quote: “In a small town, people will always suspect the worst of someone. But they’ll also suspect the best.” 4. “Boyhood” (2014): Director Richard Linklater’s chronicle of contemporary male adolescence from the ages of 6 to 18 — set in Houston, San Marcos and the Big Bend region of West Texas — is a technical marvel. Linklater used the same cast and filmed a few weeks each year over the course of a dozen years. This adds a layer of realism, especially as star Ellar Coltrane morphs from cherubic to gangly, that no amount of makeup or computer effects can duplicate.
Beyond the nightmarish logistics of such an undertaking, the nearly three-hour “Boyhood” is an involving portrait of everyday suburban family life, from collapsing marriages to new schools. And the soundtrack, from The Hives’ “Hate to Say I Told You So” to Family of the Year’s “Hero,” is a solid collection of indie rock from the century’s first decade.
Notable Texas moment: When Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) takes young Mason to an Astros game. 5. “Friday Night Lights” (2004): Buzz Bissinger’s bestselling book about the depth of passion for football in the Permian Basin became a moving film that captures the guts and the glory of Texas high school football while illuminating some of the sport’s social impact on the community around it. While neither the film nor the equally rewarding television series provided as much of the racial and economic backdrop as the book, “Friday Night Lights” the film succeeds on its own terms as a sports movie with a soul.
It’s not just about winning and losing but being. Billy Bob Thornton plays coach Gary Gaines with a flinty intensity, and he heads a solid cast of young actors (Derek Luke, Lucas Black, Garrett Hedlund, Jay Hernandez) who seem like they really could be kids from Odessa. It helps that actor-turneddirector Peter Berg captures the games in all of their bonecrunching, stadium-stomping grandeur. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose, indeed.
Notable Texas moment: Any of the football games. 6. “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005): An exhumation film without zombies. Guillermo Arriaga wrote the story about an immigrant shot and killed by Border Patrol, and Tommy Lee Jones directed and stars as a rancher and friend who wants to see him get a proper burial back home in Mexico. A rough-edged morality tale from Jones, who, thanks to “Lonesome Dove,” knows about dragging around bodies. Notable Texas moment: Any of the tense interactions between Jones’ well-intentioned rancher and Dwight Yoakam’s oily sheriff. 7. “No Country for Old Men” (2007): The shootouts and coin flips and haircuts get all the attention, which is fine because this film has a remarkable angel of death. But the quiet conclusion proves the Coen brothers were deeply attuned to writer Cormac McCarthy’s rumination on time, aging, violence and past deeds, and how they fuel feelings of resignation.
Notable Texas moment: Two grizzled lawmen (Tommy Lee Jones and Barry Corbin) talking about death, with Corbin’s voice coursing like the wind through “caliche” and “19-zero-and-9.” 8. “Paris, Texas” (1984): German director Wim Wenders and American playwright Sam Shepard, working from the Kit Carson novel, collaborated on one of the most eloquently Texas films of the last half-century. Harry Dean Stanton is a man who wanders in from the desert after four years and finds that, in some ways, he’s still lost. Notable Texas moment: The city in the title doesn’t make an appearance; the movie was filmed in Houston, El Paso, Port Arthur, Galveston, West Texas and California. 9. “The Searchers” (1956): Sure, there are aspects of John Ford’s best film that are dated now. But visually, it’s one of the most influential films ever made, with innovative use of shadow. And thematically, it was bold, too, putting John Wayne’s racist antihero at the heart of an ambiguous story about obsession, family and home.
Notable Texas moment: The iconic rock formations of Monument Valley in Arizona and
Utah stand in for Texas. But they fittingly convey the remoteness of West Texas in the 1860s. 10. “Urban Cowboy” (1980): This film, with its hit soundtrack and John Travolta starring as a Houston cowboy who likes to dance, was meant to do for country music what “Saturday Night Fever” did for disco — and it succeeded. On top of that, it popularized that whole mechanical bull thing.
Notable Texas moment: When Travolta and co-star Debra Winger two-step around the dance floor at Gilley’s. 11. “Giant” (1956): Edna Ferber’s sprawling novel about the life of West Texas cattle barons and oil tycoons became an Oscar-winning movie — starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean and a young Dennis Hopper — that runs well over three hours.
Notable Texas moment: When a gusher covers James Dean in oil. 12. “Reality Bites” (1994): This was the most contested film by our panel. Some saw it as a top-three work; others wondered if it belonged in the final 50. It landed at 12 for exemplifying the zeitgeist of its time like few other films and for showing a side of Texas that most people in the ’90s didn’t realize existed — Houston’s hip, bohemian youth culture that worshipped the Violent Femmes as much as Townes Van Zandt.
Best Texas moment: Ethan Hawke giving Winona Ryder grief for using her “daddy’s little gas card.” 13. “Bonnie & Clyde” (1967): In the early ’30s, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker put Texas on the map, but not in a good way: the Dallas couple were two of the best-known crime figures of the time. Arthur Penn’s groundbreaking account of their lurid love of blood, guns, money and, of course, each other shocked viewers 50 years ago, especially with its bullet-riddled death scene where Bonnie and Clyde — played memorably by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway — get what’s coming to them. The film, out at a time of youthful rebellion, defined its time. Notable Texas moment: The film’s sense of blackland prairie and rural expanse (it was shot all over North Texas from Denton to Waxahachie) conveys what a large chunk of the state looked like 80 years ago. 14. “Tender Mercies” (1983): Australia’s Bruce Beresford directed this heartfelt drama, but Texan Horton Foote wrote the screenplay for this wonderfully authentic tale of redemption. It stars Robert Duvall, in one of his best performances, as a down-on-his-luck country singer who has his faith in life restored after meeting a widow (Tess Harper) in a small Texas town (it was filmed in Waxahachie and Palmer).
Notable Texas moment: One of the tracks Duvall sings on the soundtrack, “It Hurts to Face Reality,” was composed by the late, great Texas country singer Lefty Frizzell, who hails from Corsicana. 15. “Places in the Heart” (1984): Sally Field won an Oscar for her role as a ’30s-era widow with two young children trying to make a go of it on a small Central Texas farm. The supporting cast — Danny Glover, John Malkovich, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Lindsay Crouse — is equally strong. But Field’s battle against difficult land and circumspect bankers is stronger. Notable Texas moment: It’s directed and written by Robert Benton, who hails from Waxahachie and also wrote the screenplay for “Bonnie & Clyde.” 16. “Blood Simple” (1984): Joel and Ethan Coen did a test run for a Texas noir years before
“No Country for Old Men.” This one is more carnal and less deeply philosophical but beautifully shot and oozing with menace, just the same with all the betrayals and double-crosses one would expect from a story that takes its title from Dashiell Hammett.
Notable Texas moment: Everything about Loren Visser, the private detective played by M. Emmet Walsh. From his yellow polyester western jacket to his sweaty face, to his query, “Just how irritated are you?” 17. “Red River” (1948): A legendary cattle drive on the Chisholm Trail from Texas to Kansas is the backdrop for this Western starring John Wayne, Walter Brennan and Montgomery Clift. It’s directed by Howard Hawks, who made important films of the 20th century such as “The Big Sleep,” “To Have and Have Not” and “Rio Bravo.”
Notable Texas moment: Crossing the Red River, though the scenes weren’t filmed anywhere near Texas. 18. “The Tree of Life” (2011): Filmmaker Terrence Malick spent some of his youth in Waco, which in part informed this deeply meditative poem of a film about the paths of grace and nature as experienced through the eyes of a boy who viewed 23. “Selena” (1997): In Selena Quintanilla, Gregory Nava had an epic story to tell with dramatic highs, struggle-filled lows and a horrifying final chapter. Because Selena was murdered so young and so early in her career, the story is compact as it runs from Lake Jackson restaurant gigs to a record crowd at the Astrodome.
Notable Texas moment: Patriarch Abraham Quintanilla explains to his music-minded children that a Mexican audience might not be as welcoming as the ones they find in Texas. 24. “Hope Floats” (1998): Smithville is the setting for this drama about a suddenly single mother (Sandra Bullock) returning home from the big city. The film, directed Texan Forest Whitaker, paints the setting in such a welcoming, warm way, it’s hard not to dream of small-town Texas where everybody knows your business, and that’s all right.
Best Texas moment: Harry Connick Jr. in a cowboy hat and boots, dancing like a Lone Star dream. 25. “Terms of Endearment” 1983: Let’s be clear: This movie might be the best pure film on this list. But the tale of a cancerstricken family and a playboy astronaut in Houston isn’t necessarily a “Texas” film. In many ways, it could have taken place in Florida or Virginia. That’s why it’s this low.
Best Texas moment: Jack Nicholson telling Shirley MacLaine she needs a drink. Her response? Bourbon.