Texans have long taken pride in the fact that their state is “like a whole other country,” but the truth is, in many ways, it’s like a whole other Louisiana.
Both are deep red states that share a border with one another. Both share an unflagging love for their distinct culture, their culinary traditions and their often-underachieving football teams.
And now, with the ascent of Jeff Landry to the Louisiana Governor’s Office, both also have chief executives committed to capital punishment.
Should an innocent get caught up? That’s a price Texas has proven it’s willing to pay — as may Louisiana if the state restarts its executions, a practice dormant since 2010.
Deeply personal triptych
Which makes this a strikingly appropriate time for “God Save Texas,” a deeply personal and deeply moving social justice documentary triptych in which three filmmakers examine their Texas hometowns and, by extension, a different societal specter looming over the Lone Star State.
In “God Save Texas: The Price of Oil,” director Alex Stapleton focuses on environmental and economic justice through the lens of people living in the Houston-area fenceline community of Pleasantville.
In “God Save Texas: La Frontera,” director Iliana Sosa looks at immigration in El Paso, Texas, and just across the border in Juarez, Mexico.
Arguably the most compelling of the three, though, is the series’ first installment, “God Save Texas: Hometown Prison,” in which multiple Oscar nominee Richard Linklater (“Boyhood,” “Before Sunrise,” “School of Rock”) takes a hard look at the role of the prison system in his East Texas hometown of Huntsville.
Prison capital of Texas
Just an hour’s drive from Houston and 2½ hours from the Louisiana border, Huntsville is a place of piney woods that feels much more like the American South than it does the scrublands of West Texas. That’s true of its geography and of its people.
Like their Louisiana neighbors, East Texans are strong-willed and independent but also, at their core, good folks. Hard-working folks. Country folks.
They also happen to live in the prison capital of Texas, a city boasting no fewer than seven houses of detention. That notably includes the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, where the state has executed 586 human beings — many of them guilty — since 1982, according to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
It’s not the first time Linklater has tapped into his Huntsville upbringing for inspiration. His experiences there notably informed his 1993 high school-set “Dazed and Confused” — the film responsible for giving us Matthew McConaughey — and, more recently, its 2016 spiritual sequel, “Everybody Wants Some!!”
It’s the first time, however, he so directly confronts Huntsville’s reputation as the execution capital of the world.
Despite the shadow cast over the city by that distinction, and that nearly everybody in town has been somehow touched by it, Linklater admits he didn’t much ponder the prisons as a kid. There were there, and life went on.
So did deaths, incidentally.
Then, he explains at his film’s outset, he learned that yet another prisoner was scheduled to be put to death while he was home visiting. Frustrated by his inability to do anything about it, he packed up his camera, headed to the Big House, outside of which death penalty protesters were making their objections heard, and began filming.
Earnest discussions on film
That launched him on a journey that would connect him with an assortment of Huntsville residents for earnest and humanizing discussions about the psychic scars the industry has had on them and the town.
It is an affecting exercise.
Tightly edited and briskly paced, Linklater’s film is at once enjoyable, given that the people with whom he visits are all such good-natured, down-home folks, but also unnerving, given the subject matter.
Now, to be clear: This is activist filmmaking, pure and simple. The liberal Linklater doesn’t hide his distaste for capital punishment.
That said, the discussions he has in “God Save Texas” are all honest, open, civil and constructive. There’s no shouting or threatening. No Sturm und Drang, no sound, fury or political grandstanding.
Just an effort to understand.
It's also a discussion from which Louisiana can benefit — now more than ever.
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