September 16-22, 2004

movies

Right and Wrong

mining the cliches: In Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper), John Sayles has created a not-so-subtle parody of our commander in chief.

Silver City is as inarguable as it is unwatchable.

Silver City

by Sam Adams

Many are the crimes of George W. Bush. But here's one even his most ardent critics would be hard-pressed to lay at his door: prompting John Sayles to make the worst movie of his career.

Sayles has never been one to camouflage his political convictions, but never before has he so blatantly set aside storytelling for speechifying. Like many of Sayles' films, Silver City is a sprawling, multicharacter tale whose true protagonist is a community, not an individual. It's also a position paper with legs. In City of Hope and Lone Star, and to a lesser degree Sunshine State, Sayles managed to pump up his cast list without losing the plot, but often in Silver City, you get the feeling that Sayles is just marking time until it's someone else's turn to lecture.

The one person who can be counted on not to hold forth is Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper), who's in the process of campaigning for the Colorado governorship. "Dim Dickie," as his campaign manager (Richard Dreyfuss) puts it, "is not a fine-print fanatic," which is what makes him the preferred candidate of the state's mining interests, represented by cowboy billionaire Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofferson). The son of senior Sen. Judd Pilager (Michael Murphy), Dickie has drifted around in life, blowing a fortune on an abandoned silver mine that turned out to be abandoned for good reason, facing financial failure until his father's chief contributor bailed him out.

Is this starting to sound familiar? As if there weren't enough movies explicitly about George W. Bush floating around, Sayles has manufactured his own life-size replica, right down to his fumbling tongue. It's one thing to satirize a public figure, another to simply stretch a mask over his face and call him something else. Because Dickie Pilager, from his first appearance, is so clearly a Bush simulacrum, you never consider that he might be anything else, which means there's no chance you might be persuaded to look at Bush in a different way. All Sayles does is regurgitate some of the best-known facts and easiest prejudices, and pretend he's made some cutting insight. Look at that surname!

Sadly, Silver City's original characters aren't much more compelling, and in Danny Huston, Sayles seems to have discovered one of the dullest actors ever to grace the screen. As Danny O'Brien, a reporter involuntarily turned private eye, Huston (the son of the late director John) moves with the agility of frozen sludge, and thinks just as quickly: You can almost see ideas trying valiantly to scale his face and penetrate his brain, then giving up in disgust. Right after Danny gets assigned to deliver "a good stiff warning" to the folks on Pilager's enemies list, one of whom may have planted the waterlogged corpse Dickie hooks while filming a campaign commercial in fly-fishing gear, he returns home to find his girlfriend has moved out. Only he doesn't realize it at first, even after he notices the blank spot on the floor and muses, "There used to be a couch there." Only when he walks over to the refrigerator and notices the markings on the calendar in big red pen — "Call movers," two weeks previous, and "D-day!" that morning — does he realize his live-in lover has left him flat. So much for reporter's intuition.

To be charitable, maybe there's a point to Danny's numskull nature, and to the way Silver City's characters follow his lead in noticing something, pausing, then redundantly stating their findings, as if Sayles were subtitling the plot for the thick-witted. Maybe the point is that most people don't notice what's staring them right in the face, and so it's John Sayles' job to open our eyes, or at least shove the facts so close to our nose that we can't help but wince. "We think we can't wound this planet, but someday the bill comes due," says a character who is inserted for no other reason than to deliver that line. In other words, ignore the obvious at your peril.

Unfortunately for Sayles, stating the obvious hardly makes for a gripping yarn, no matter how many career-crisising actors you convince to "reinvent" themselves. (In addition to Dreyfuss' hammy campaign chief, there's Billy Zane as an oily lobbyist, Mary Kay Place as Danny's crusty boss, Maria Bello as a hard-nosed reporter, Tim Roth as a paranoid-but-right Internet sleuth, Thora Birch as his rainbow-haired assistant, and Daryl Hannah as the governor-to-be's damaged sister. Phew.) Silver City is right about a lot of things, especially the way politicians have ceded power to their corporate backers, and how both combine to treat entire states like private enclaves. But being right doesn't make it any easier to bear.

Silver City Written and directed by John Sayles An IFC Films release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse