Word: frontera
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...Tennis Partner (HarperCollins; 345 pages; $25) begins, it finds Verghese moving with his wife and two sons to El Paso, Texas, a frontera culture whose dusty glamour seduces this connoisseur of border crossings. But as he separates from his wife, Verghese begins to anchor himself more and more through his regular tennis games with a charismatic Australian medical student of his called David. Only slowly does he realize that his tennis coach, student and friend is, like many doctors (he informs us), caught in a cycle of drug dependency...
...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...
...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...
...Sayles does indeed treat the small Texan Town ("Frontera") as a kind of continuous backdrop, across the generations, for all the plotlines. His camera technique reflects this: in lieu of the sudden cuts to flashbacks, he uses one, long camera movement to go back in time. The effect has the relaxed feel of a huge storybook page being turned. One moment, we see a confrontation between a young black man and old Sheriff Wade, ages ago, in a bar. Then the camera sweeps upward slowly--and we're staring in the face of Sheriff Sam Deeds, present-tense, listening...
...right with Sam, who's tired of swallowing invidious comparisons between his performance in office and his dad1s. Solving this long-ago crime is more pretext than text in this movie, says Schickel. 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. Sayles wants us to understand that when we deny history we grant it a more disruptive power...