Reviewed - Silver City: There's political sin as well as predictable spin in John Sayles's political drama, writes Donald Clarke
JOHN Sayles's latest didactic soap opera - a genre he visited with greater success in Sunshine State and City of Hope - begins with Dickie Pilager, right-wing candidate for the governorship of Colorado, hooking a dead body while fishing for the cameras. Private investigator Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston) is called in to investigate and discovers that the corpse ties Pilager (consider that name for a moment) to a sinister conspiracy involving all the worst things of which liberals fear conservatives capable.
Considering how big the lake is and how small the body, this is a pretty significant coincidence, but it is typical of a film whose scope and ambition is almost overpowered by its indiscipline.
It is, perhaps, best to approach Silver City as a series of intriguing vignettes, rather than a coherent narrative. In his travels Danny, once a radical journalist, encounters an internet radical (Tim Roth), a right-wing DJ (Miguel Ferrer), a faintly messianic businessman (Kris Kristofferson), an ageing environmentalist (Ralph Waite) and, most bizarrely of all, a bow-and-arrow wielding member of the Pilager family, who might suggest a character from Kill Bill even if she weren't played by Daryl Hannah.
The film is so furiously busy it has trouble finding time for its most interesting character. The syntactically challenged Pilager, played with beautiful confusion by Chris Cooper, a Sayles regular, seems sincere in his beliefs, even if he hasn't the wit to understand their consequences. He is assisted in his attempts to follow his father into office by an angry, cynical spin-doctor (Richard Dreyfuss), the same shape as Karl Rove. You can see where this is going. But Cooper manages to bring humanity to this pseudo-Bush, without softening the edge of the satire.
Sadly, there is little subtlety elsewhere. A working-class Mexican is saintly. Kristofferson's robber baron is demonic. Roth's frustrated militant lives among conspiracies. The film plays as if it were banged out hurriedly in a fit of leftist fury and, as such, will probably play best to the already converted.
