The Soul of Texas

The author and journalist Lawrence Wright is one of the biggest thinkers in Texas, a thoughtful chronicler of culture and its seismic shifts. When his book “God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State” came out in 2018, it followed Wright’s Big Topic nonfiction books on subjects ranging from terrorism to Scientology to a deeply researched, perfectly timed pandemic novel. It appeared in April of 2020.

“God Save Texas,” however, was a more personal work with a wide reach: Texas is a huge, multifaceted state impossible to sum up even at book length. By mixing autobiography with his usual spot-on attention to detail, Wright focused on specific topic areas and geographies.

Wright looms large in the prestige TV adaptation of the same name “Inspired by” his book, which arrives on HBO with three auteur-directed episodes. He’s not only an executive producer on the project but appears in every episode in deep on-screen conversations with the three documentarians: Richard Linklater, Alex Stapleton and Iliana Sosa.

Wisely, Wright doesn’t narrate the series or host it; even though each episode, like the book, tackles a distinct Texas problem or cultural touchstone. He hands the reins to other Texas-born chroniclers. Each explores a topic area related to the place where they grew up. Linklater, the most well-known of the three filmmakers, covers capital punishment in the prison capital of the country, Hunstville. Stapleton charts her family’s history as Black residents of Pleasantville who the state’s oil industry has victimized. And Sosa returns to El Paso for a look at how immigration policies have transformed the duality of citizens in that city and its connected twin in Mexico, Ciudad Juarez.

As you’d expect from an anthology series with multiple directors plus a famous book author who inspired it directly in the mix, the tone and approach vary wildly with each episode.

Linklater, for instance, warmly bathes what could have been an unsparing look at the executions in his hometown with nostalgia and understated conversation. “What is it about hometowns and the American consciousness?” he muses in voiceover. The filmmaker reaches back to his high-school football buddies, men who used to date his single mom including a crusading local lawyer, and current correctional workers and high school students.

The easygoing, but deeply thoughtful chats reveal that while many people live and die in Huntsville with only passing thoughts about the criminal justice war happening under their noses, those whose lives touch it even tangentially are usually much worse for it. Even Linklater himself, who went on to great success, was haunted by Huntsville; he shows how memories of the town found their way into films like “Boyhood” and “Dazed and Confused.” Notably, he recounts that he tried to get a script made about a death-row inmate that he was never able to get financed. Around that time, in 2003, Linklater shot footage in Huntsville of the impending execution of Delma Banks that now forms the opening of this hour-and-a-half documentary.

It’s familiar Linklater, playing with time and memory and the effects over decades of our decisions and by the end, this easygoing, laidback documentary has turned into a quietly furious and outraged statement on the corrosiveness of the death penalty.

The second episode, about Stapleton’s family connections to the oil and chemical plants near Houston, unfortunately doesn’t go as deep. It’s mostly a family history with the oil companies as the faceless villains in more than a century of polluting communities and depriving workers a share of the massive profits those companies generated.

Of the three, Stapleton’s episode is the most straightforward and feels the most like a self-important HBO Film documentary. Oddly, it’s when Stapleton shifts her focus away from outrage and more on lesser-known cultural shifts, such as the rise of African-American truckers or when Stapleton ties the area’s economic failures to multiple natural disasters that also devastated the gulf coast’s disenfranchised, that things get much more interesting.

The ”God Save Texas” closer is its most lyrical and beautiful. Sosa gets at why El Paso is so distinct from other cities in the state, starting with the notion that Juarez and El Paso are one giant town that only recently disallowed workers and families to cross back and forth and live dual lives.

Sosa, whose camera manages to frame some of the most gorgeous shots you’ll ever see of the West Texas mountains, argues that immigration policies have not only led to needless deaths, but have stripped residents on both sides of the border of their ability to have fluid identities. El Paso comes across, under Sosa’s eye, as very old, yet surprisingly progressive a glimpse of a possible cultural future of America that many politicians can’t yet grasp and continue to resist.

Even a scene meant to show the cruelty inherent in trying to fix immigration policies–a five-minute meeting of families from each side of the U.S.-Mexico border held on a platform on top of the Rio Grande–is beautifully shot and put into its properly humane context. Whether the people who need to see it every will is harder to say.

Toward the end of the episode, as they sit by a mountain near the border, Sosa asks Wright what he thinks the solution is for the fight over immigration. Wearily, he says he thinks immigrants have been able to retain their dignity upon crossing over despite good reasons for coming to America. “The further you get away from the border, the less you understand it,” he says.

Wright understands quite a bit how Texas works and showing that on film is not easy. Here’s hoping God Save Texas returns with another season as thoughtfully told and as wide-ranging as the first.