Released 2004
Stars Danny Huston, Chris Cooper, Richard Dreyfuss, Maria Bello, Daryl Hannah, Billy Zane, Kris Kristofferson, Michael Murphy, Sal Lopez, James Gammon, Tim Roth
Directed by John Sayles

John Sayles' "Silver City" can be read as social satire aimed at George W. Bush -- certainly the film's hero mirrors the Bush quasi-speaking style -- but it takes wider aim on the entire political landscape we inhabit. Liberals and conservatives, the alternative press and establishment dailies, environmentalists and despoilers, are all mixed up in a plot where it seems appropriate that the hero is a private detective. Even the good guys are compromised.

The movie centers on the campaign of Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper), who is running for governor of Colorado with the backing of his father (Michael Murphy), the state's senior senator. Dickie is the creature of industrial interests who want to roll back pollution controls and penalties, but as the movie opens, he's dressed like an L.L. Bean model as he stands in front of a lake and repeats, or tries to repeat, platitudes about the environment. Cooper deliberately makes him sound as much like George II as possible. The younger Pilager may be clueless, but he's not powerless. His campaign is being managed by a Karl Rove type named Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss), who tells him what to say and how to say it. There's not always time to explain why to say it. 

Surrounding the campaign, at various degrees of separation, other characters develop interlocking subplots. The most important involves the discovery of a dead body in a lake, and the attempts of private eye Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston) to investigate the case. O'Brien is in the tradition of Elliott Gould in Altman's "The Long Goodbye"; he's an untidy, shambling, seemingly distracted, superficially charming loser who often seems to be talking beside the point, instead of on it.

It's a good question whether movies like this have any real political influence. Certainly Sayles is a lifelong liberal and so is his cinematographer, the great Haskell Wexler. (So are Murphy and Dreyfuss, for that matter.) They create a character who is obviously intended to be George W. Bush. How do we know that? Because Dickie Pilager speaks in short, simplistic sound bites, uses platitudes to conceal his real objectives and has verbal vertigo. Now, then: Am I attacking the president with that previous sentence or only describing him? Perhaps to describe George W.'s speaking style in that way is not particularly damaging, because America is familiar with the way he talks, and about half of us are comfortable with it.

That's why "Silver City" may not change any votes. There is nothing in the movie's portrait of Pilager/Bush that has not already been absorbed and discounted by the electorate. Everybody knows that Bush expresses noble thoughts about the environment while his administration labors to license more pollution and less conservation. We know Bush's sponsors include the giant energy companies, and that Enron and Ken Lay were his major contributors before Lay's fall from grace. So when Dickie Pillager is revealed as the creature of anti-environment conglomerates, it comes as old news.

The movie's strength, then, is not in its outrage, but in its cynicism and resignation. There is something honest and a little brave about the way Sayles refuses to provide closure at the end of his movie. Virtue is not rewarded, crime is not punished, morality lies outside the rules of the game, and because the system is rotten, no one who plays in it can be entirely untouched. Some characters are better than others, some are not positively bad, but their options are limited, and their will is fading. Thackeray described Vanity Fair as "a novel without a hero." Sayles has made this film in the same spirit -- so much so, that I'm reminded of the title of another Victorian novel, The Way We Live Now.

Summary by Roger Ebert

I love John Sayles' movies. He's truly a great filmmaker who marches to his own drummer. While I don't think this is one of his best films, I do think  it's a good one. The tough part is half of us in this country want to see Dickie Pillager get his comeuppance and to see his wrongs be righted, but it doesn't work that way, does it? It's not fair to concentrate on the W characterization, though, because this movie is first and foremost a murder mystery. Like all of Sayles' movies, though, that's just a vehicle for exploring more interesting territory. The film was weak in one area, and that was in its logic for why the Pilager campaign hired a private investigator to look into the dead body incident. As long as no one connected that incident with Pilager, it didn't make any sense for the campaign to investigate. Did Chuck really believe someone would kill an illegal immigrant worker and place his body in a lake with the hope that Dickie would snag him during a commercial shoot? That's pretty far fetched and affected the cohesiveness of the story. If Danny's investigation had been better motivated, the movie would have hung together better. Still, you have to love a movie that's willing to take shots at our government's marriage with big business, and the final shot of the dead fish popping up in the lake will be one of W's legacies. It's depressing, but someone has to confront it. --Bill Alward, May 8, 2005