“Silver City”
Newmarket Films
Starring: Chris Cooper, Richard Dreyfuss, Billy Zane and Daryl Hannah
The Verdict: “Silver City” goes for political jabs, rather than good storytelling.
2 of 4 stars
If movies can actually influence election results, then President Bush should start packing his bags. With “Team America: World Police” on the horizon in the weeks ahead and films like “Fahrenheit 9/11” and the pro-Kerry documentary “Going Upriver” still making the rounds nationwide, there’s a liberal feeding frenzy at the fall box office.
Indie mainstay John Sayles throws his hat in the Bush-bashing ring with “Silver City,” which features a dimwitted Colorado politico running for governor in the interests of his corporate bedfellows and his powerful senior senator pappy.
Sayles uses Colorado as his palette for political malfeasance, but his focus is America at large. The writer/director’s landscape is overrun by leftists and conservatives battling more over power than over right and wrong, a teeming riff-raff of scroungers, puppets and opportunists out to make a name, a play or a quick buck.
Soulless lobbyists sell themselves to the highest bidder in the name of money. Millionaire polluters own football teams and rape the environment in the name of the American Dream. Members of the alternative press pound endlessly away on their keyboards, spinning conspiracy theories to undermine authority in the name of the unspoken underdog. Everyone’s got an agenda. Everyone’s a slave to the system.
Sayles’ most pointed jabs seemed aimed at the Bush White House, with Cooper filling the Dubya role. Cooper’s Dickie Pilager is less a leader than a trained seal. He looks the part of governor and can sell the role when he remembers his lines; when he’s called upon to improvise; however, he’s lost.
Cooper has fun impersonating our commander in chief’s fumbling answers, vacant stares, halting speech patterns and “circle-the-wagons” bravado. He spouts terms like “frontier justice” with just the right combination of assurance and cluelessness, cocking his hips and flailing his arms. While watching a televised press conference, one character observes that Pilager looks much more gubernatorial with the sound turned off.
“Silver City” is a cynical look at the rotting political foundations of our perhaps-not-so-great-as-we-think nation, but Sayles has always tried to be a storyteller first and an activist second. He’s most at home with ensemble pieces and screenplays that focus on places, communities, people and long-ingrained mindsets. His best films-“Lone Star,” “Passion Fish,” “Sunshine State”-have been skillful balancing acts between cultural issues and simple human drama.
This time, as in “Lone Star,” Sayles offsets politics with a whodunit. Pilager and his cronies are filming an environmentally conscious campaign ad when the candidate casts his fishing line into a Rocky Mountain lake and reels in an unidentified corpse. Pilager’s spin doctor (Richard Dreyfuss) smells sabotage and enlists shabby private investigator Danny O’Brien (Danny Huston) to question and bully known anti-Pilager types who might be involved. Danny, ostensibly the film’s lead, doggedly makes the usual murder/mystery rounds, getting answers from some suspects while running dangerously afoul of others.
Minor developments and digressions inspire the best moments in “Silver City.” The setting is the star, as Sayles takes audiences to mountain lakes, abandoned mines and capitol steps, each location brimming over with authenticity and local color. As Danny gets closer to the truth, the locations get more exotic and the witnesses more eccentric. Danny first interrogates a tightly-wound radio shock jock, next, a spiritually-beaten tour guide and finally, Pilager’s oddball sister, a dope-smoking middle-aged rebel with an affinity for archery.
“Silver City” pulses with the vitality of ongoing life outside the constraints of the plot. Sayles’ scripts are filled with plot holes and little ambiguities, but such is life. Characters come and go, arriving from the fringes to the foreground with little fanfare and exiting with the same.
Luckily, Sayles has assembled a great stable of supporting players to fill in the gaps of his all-over-the-map script. Billy Zane, for instance, is great as a sleazy corporate mouthpiece whose only morality comes with a price tag attached, and Daryl Hannah is a hoot as the loopy black sheep with an axe to grind. Tim Roth (as an underground computer journalist) and ultra-grizzled James Gammon (as a sheriff with conflicting interests) add gravity to any film, and Sal Lopez is so good as Danny’s sidekick in snooping that one wishes he were playing the main character instead of Huston.
Danny Huston is a genial onscreen presence, but he regrettably doesn’t have the chops to pull off his central role. O’Brien champions the underdogs in life, awakening from moral death now and again to fight for a cause he believes in, especially if the cause is a losing one. He’s a “true believer” who is deeply wounded when his causes are defeated, the type of guy who’s crushed when the answer to a murder plot doesn’t provide any answers for his messy private life or for the world.
Huston nails Danny’s surface, all wandering eyes and superficial smiles, but he doesn’t invest the character with enough soul to make his loser’s moral crises even moderately interesting. Also problematic is Sayles’ clumsy equation of O’Brien to Pilager, who is also called, without irony, a “true believer.”
“Silver City” breaks down when it tries to be anything other than a leisurely detective story. The script takes too many detours; there’s too much going on that the audience cares too little about. Sayles’ subplots grow tiring (an unneeded romance between O’Brien and a fetching reporter, for example), and his political potshots become increasingly dated and erratic, beating horses as dead as illegal immigration, closet racism (a Sayles favorite) and Whitewater.
Other times one can hear the machinery of Sayles’ script grinding slowly and audibly away. Too many interchanges feel like chances for opposing characters to swap ideologies and reveal bite-size nuggets of plot development.
There’s flavor but little urgency in Sayles’ direction. There’s tonal disparity from scene to scene, apparent in the mismatched performances of a whiny Thora Birch and a hot-blooded Miguel Ferrer, of an overemphatic Richard Dreyfuss and a dull-as-dirt Maria Bello.
One must also fault Sayles for largely missing an easy target. Sayles’ satire is toothless because it brings nothing new to the table. So Bush’s daddy might be the power behind the throne? So Dubya can’t seem to answer questions on his feet? So he sings the praises of the environment while making it easier for corporations to make a sludge pile of the American wilderness? So what? Tell us something we don’t know. Muckrake, invent something, just make an effort! Say what you will about Michael Moore, but at least his crackpot theories are fresh and entertaining.
The film’s closing minutes are its worst. Sayles’ cynicism becomes smothering as Pilager marches toward victory while a business partner dumps untold gallons of toxins into a lake, claiming untold casualties of fish and causing untold numbers of audience members to roll their eyes at the writer/director’s heavy-handed symbolism. And, all the while, “America the Beautiful” blares away on the soundtrack, arrogantly asserting the obvious point that America ain’t always all it’s cracked up to be.
Sayles delivers a “City” that’s more pyrite than silver, and it’s a major disappointment from a man whose films are usually much more thoughtful. Instead of a satisfying movie, it feels more like a mud-slinging political ad. It points out everything that’s wrong with the opposition and the world but offers no solution for making things better. One character sadly notes near film’s end that the American people have simply “lost the ability to be scandalized.” Not by bad movies, they haven’t.
Mr. Sayles, you’ve made your point. You can cast your vote come Election Day like any other normal citizen. For now, please cast aside your soapbox and go back to making good movies.