Review: Silver City

Silver City is about a prefab political puppet and the Haliburton-like corporation that pulls his strings.

Silver City
Photo: Newmarket Films

Thanks to the Fox News channel, you probably know that Silver City casts Chris Cooper as a Dubya-like buffoon running for Colorado’s gubernatorial spot, but if you’re familiar with John Sayles’s work, then you know not to expect a rah-rah Fahrenheit 9/11-styled polemic. Essentially an Indiewood version of Jonathan Demme’s terrific The Manchurian Candidate, Silver City is about a prefab political puppet and the Haliburton-like corporation that pulls his strings. When Cooper’s Dickie Pilager reels in more than a fish while filming an innocuous political ad, his campaign manager, Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfusss), enlists a local firm to figure out who may be gunning for the guy.

Since Silver City is both a thriller and a comedy, it’s easy to forgive the campaign’s scarcely justified paranoia, which is more or less an excuse for a private investigator and ex-journalist, Danny O’Brien (Danny Huston), to stitch and subsequently unravel the Nashville-lite tapestry that connects the townsfolk. A Big Tobacco proponent, Chandler Tyson (Billy Zane), works for a Cheney-like goon, Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofersson), who may cost a gung-ho reporter, Nora Allardyce (Maria Bello), her job when his all-powerful Bentine corporation buys the newspaper she works for. Further out on the sidelines, Mexican émigrés struggle with the threat of deportation, Miguel Ferrer cusses up a storm, and a horned-up Olympic hopeful played by Daryl Hannah fucks Danny and shoots arrows at a picture of her brother Dickie.

What with all the multicultural preaching, oft-sly political commentary (Chuck interprets Dickie’s call for “cultural equilibrium” as “no hand-outs for homos”), and the rhythmic dialogue that sounds like real-life chitchat, Silver City is a Sayles production through and through. But like the very political ads being produced by Dickie’s people, the film is another one of Sayles’s headline-culled public service announcements, except this one has less internal momentum than most and even less of a discernable point.

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More expository than the lovely, fragile Sunshine State, the slow-burning Silver City may be equally spare but has none of its Southern comfort. Worse yet, it’s cluttered with people who scarcely register as such. Sayles rarely uses the camera to emotionally enlarge his ideas, a non-aesthetic approach he’s forever used to lay his politics bare. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Because said politics see little elaboration in Silver City, the film takes on the appearance of the floating dead fish of the final shot. It’s a fabulous image: a metaphor for Dubya’s shady politicking, but also one for Sayles’s own filmmaking.

Score: 
 Cast: Maria Bello, Thora Birch, David Clennon, Chris Cooper, Alma Delfina, Richard Dreyfuss, Miguel Ferrer, James Gammon, Daryl Hannah, Danny Huston, Kris Kristofferson, Sal Lopez, Michael Murphy, Mary Kay Place, Tim Roth, Luis Saguar, Ralph Waite, Billy Zane, Frito Lopez, Rafi Quiñones  Director: John Sayles  Screenwriter: John Sayles  Distributor: Newmarket Films  Running Time: 129 min  Rating: R  Year: 2004  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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