Lone Star is, for better and for worse, an efficient encapsulation of the two things that make John Sayles films, well, John Sayles films: His earnest filmmaking and his egalitarianism towards his characters.
Lone Star was the first Sayles movie I saw (and the only one until you covered him). My memory could be fuzzy, but I thought it was pretty good. One thing you didn’t mention is that Buddy was clearly a corrupt sheriff, and the people who remembered him fondly participated in that corruption. His predecessor was even worse, but Buddy was someone they could work with. This changes how we should view his murder of his superior: he wasn’t simply killing a bad guy to punish him for his wrongs, he was slotting himself in as the new boss standing to benefit from a more efficient system of graft. We can also think of the reveal that he’s Pilar’s father in that context. Buddy is a high status guy who has both a conventional marriage and child with a white woman, and a hushed up relationship with a Mexican woman with a child he secretly fathered. His son hates that Buddy got away with being this beloved and idealized figure in the town simply by virtue of comparison to the even worse sheriff before him (which his son wouldn’t have been around to see as a point of comparison).
Lone Star was the first Sayles movie I saw (and the only one until you covered him). My memory could be fuzzy, but I thought it was pretty good. One thing you didn’t mention is that Buddy was clearly a corrupt sheriff, and the people who remembered him fondly participated in that corruption. His predecessor was even worse, but Buddy was someone they could work with. This changes how we should view his murder of his superior: he wasn’t simply killing a bad guy to punish him for his wrongs, he was slotting himself in as the new boss standing to benefit from a more efficient system of graft. We can also think of the reveal that he’s Pilar’s father in that context. Buddy is a high status guy who has both a conventional marriage and child with a white woman, and a hushed up relationship with a Mexican woman with a child he secretly fathered. His son hates that Buddy got away with being this beloved and idealized figure in the town simply by virtue of comparison to the even worse sheriff before him (which his son wouldn’t have been around to see as a point of comparison).