Tarnished City
John Sayles, one of the most solid, provocative and intelligent filmmakers working today, has allowed his politics to override his storytelling. His fictional diatribe against George W. Bush and the Republican Party, Silver City, is a murky, facile, almost embarrassing attack on the current political scene.
Silver City ostensibly is about the days leading up to an election for governor in which Republican Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper) has become the subject of a perceived attack to discredit him. His campaign manager Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss) hires disgraced journalist cum private eye Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston) to inform Pilager's enemies that they are being "watched." The movie then follows O'Brien's meetings with the three enemies—talk radio personality Cliff Castleton (Miguel Ferrer), mining engineer Casey Lyle (Ralph Waite) and Pilager's sister Maddy (Daryl Hannah). In addition, O'Brien investigates the death of the man who has set the movie's events in motion leading him to the abandoned Pilager mining site Silver City.
Sayles has assembled a terrific cast and has all the elements in place for a modern-day Chinatown, but, wearing both his politics and plot contrivances on his sleeve, Sayles, who wrote, directed, and edited the movie, undermines all this to explore issues ranging from environmentalism to immigration to the idiocy of Bush. In short, the movie is a big mess of characters and subplots all adding up to a lot of nothing.
Silver City's fundamental problem is that it does not know what it wants to be. Is it a political satire, is it a thriller, is it a social commentary, or a romance? It's all of these and, ultimately, none of these. And that's too bad, because Sayles covered much of the same ground in his tour de force Lone Star, delivering a message and a terrific story with compelling characters all at the same time.
Here we get overt symbolism—Pilager rhymes with pillage, dead fish rising to the surface of a polluted lake with "America the Beautiful" warbling on the soundtrack—and a pay off that is about as cynical as a movie could get.
Cooper does a dead on impersonation of President Bush, but it's hard to buy that a complete moron would be put up for a run for governor, even if the win is assured. Huston as the lead plays a man so filled with rage and loathing that he can barely function, but his performance is stilted and feels more theatrical than cinematic. Tim Roth's Mitch Paine (again overt symbolism), a sleazy, crusading Internet publisher, is terrific and one of the few memorable characters in the piece.
Modern politics—no matter one's political affiliation—is ripe for the picking. If Sayles really wanted to do a number on the Republicans and Bush, he should have taken a page from Tim Robbins' 1992 mockumentary Bob Roberts, which did two things that Silver City doesn't: focus on the candidate and create a compelling scandal.
Ultimately, it's Sayles' two-dimensional thinking that sinks Silver City, and that's a shame because something precious could have been mined from this material.
Silver City ostensibly is about the days leading up to an election for governor in which Republican Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper) has become the subject of a perceived attack to discredit him. His campaign manager Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss) hires disgraced journalist cum private eye Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston) to inform Pilager's enemies that they are being "watched." The movie then follows O'Brien's meetings with the three enemies—talk radio personality Cliff Castleton (Miguel Ferrer), mining engineer Casey Lyle (Ralph Waite) and Pilager's sister Maddy (Daryl Hannah). In addition, O'Brien investigates the death of the man who has set the movie's events in motion leading him to the abandoned Pilager mining site Silver City.
Sayles has assembled a terrific cast and has all the elements in place for a modern-day Chinatown, but, wearing both his politics and plot contrivances on his sleeve, Sayles, who wrote, directed, and edited the movie, undermines all this to explore issues ranging from environmentalism to immigration to the idiocy of Bush. In short, the movie is a big mess of characters and subplots all adding up to a lot of nothing.
Silver City's fundamental problem is that it does not know what it wants to be. Is it a political satire, is it a thriller, is it a social commentary, or a romance? It's all of these and, ultimately, none of these. And that's too bad, because Sayles covered much of the same ground in his tour de force Lone Star, delivering a message and a terrific story with compelling characters all at the same time.
Here we get overt symbolism—Pilager rhymes with pillage, dead fish rising to the surface of a polluted lake with "America the Beautiful" warbling on the soundtrack—and a pay off that is about as cynical as a movie could get.
Cooper does a dead on impersonation of President Bush, but it's hard to buy that a complete moron would be put up for a run for governor, even if the win is assured. Huston as the lead plays a man so filled with rage and loathing that he can barely function, but his performance is stilted and feels more theatrical than cinematic. Tim Roth's Mitch Paine (again overt symbolism), a sleazy, crusading Internet publisher, is terrific and one of the few memorable characters in the piece.
Modern politics—no matter one's political affiliation—is ripe for the picking. If Sayles really wanted to do a number on the Republicans and Bush, he should have taken a page from Tim Robbins' 1992 mockumentary Bob Roberts, which did two things that Silver City doesn't: focus on the candidate and create a compelling scandal.
Ultimately, it's Sayles' two-dimensional thinking that sinks Silver City, and that's a shame because something precious could have been mined from this material.
