Silver City

So, at first I was skeptical. I thought, oh boy another clichéd jab at George W. Bush. There was some of that but the movie went further and came out pretty decent. See, Bush isn't my favorite but I'm not so obsessed to want to watch an entire movie about it.

OK, so this "fictional political candidate" -- basically Chris Cooper doing a good George W. impression -- is a bumbling idiot named Dicky Pillager (oh, my hand...it's so HEAVY!) who is not so much a "bad guy" as the people around him are. The movie is a fun exploration of Dick's diverse family and the frightening political machine of his PR team. It slowly turns into a mystery story, kind of like Chinatown or some private eye story with a high angle of a smoky office shot through a lazy ceiling fan. This movie has no smoky office with a fan though.

It's a decent story. I'm sure there are some "clever" jabs at the current president that we've heard a million times before. "Oh, he's killing the earth!" kind of stuff. It's not as irritating and self-righteous as it sounds. There are some jabs right back at the "crazy hippies" running a scathing anti-Pillager website. It's good to consider that what you think is true about your elected leaders is the product of spin doctoring and grooming.

Good actors, decent story, not bad.

You'll never look at "W" again without thinking of Dickie Pilager! Nice piece of political satire and all too true. Well shot...well acted... and well directed. The characters are slightly "comic bookish" but consider their real life counterparts.

Be sure to look at the "Additional features" on the DVD. It contains some very pointed social commentary from some very concerned and talented individuals. This movie is probably more important now that we have had the election outcome of 2004.

The Haskell Wexler cinematography is really excellent. Be sure to notice the backgrounds when he is interviewed!

Limp satire misses almost every mark. The target appears to be Bush, but none of Bush's real weaknesses are underscored with any satiric edge - speeches by Bush himself are funnier than those delivered by Candidate Pillager. In fact the script can't decide whether it's a real satire or a dramatic comment on political problems faced by illegal aliens. At any rate, the pacing of the comic moments is pretty bad - there's no oomph here, no energy. The acting also lacks energy - it is clear the actors aren't sure what Sayles wants from them - a matter made worse by the fact that every character is embarrassingly miscast.

This film is a shocking disappointment for admirers of Sayles' previous exceptionally fine work. What the heck went wrong here? And now I see Sayles is slated to do a "Juraissic Park" sequel? Obviously something's gone bad for this man's career - I hope he can pull it back together. But not with a film this incomplete.

What film depicts corrupt politicians and businessmen controlling a vast local resource but enduring a sometimes-hapless yet attractive detective investigating a murder involving those community leaders? If you said 'Chinatown,' you'd be correct; if you said 'Silver City,' you'd also be correct. There are other similarities such as both have stars with last names Huston, and justice is long coming. Beyond that, there is no qualitative similarity: Roman Polanski's 'Chinatown' is a classic; John Sayles' 'Silver City' is a contemporary curiosity.

'Contemporary' because the liberal Sayles writes and directs about a political campaign for the governorship of Colorado that barely disguises its protagonists as George Bush (Chris Cooper) and Karl Rove (Richard Dreyfuss) knockoffs. Cooper's candidate has halting, incomplete, and scripted sentences, undoubtedly the speech patterns of Bush. The manipulative and effective machinations of Dreyfuss's operative are patently those of the infamous Bush campaign mastermind.

The story and dialogue are undistinguished, as if they count on the audience to be mesmerized by the broad parallels to the 2004 campaign. (See 'Primary Colors' for wit and grit about the Clinton campaign, starring John Travolta.) Although Danny Huston (son of John and brother of Angelica) is a lesser Jack Nicholson, his easy-going persona works well for a detective who constantly gets himself into trouble rather than his clients out of it.

The comparison to Michael Moore's documentary 'Fahrenheit 911' is inevitable. The heavy-handedness of 'Silver' makes Moore's work look almost subtle, yet Sayles must be praised for his dissenting voice in parlous times for free speech. Sayles is more successful in weaving the intricate patterns of corruption in 'City of Hope'; here he seems more like Moore in an overt attempt to topple a sitting president. Sayles's 'Lone Star' is more believable, and that's about incest.

John, Viscount Morley in 'Rousseau' wrote, 'Those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand the one or the other.'

These filmmakers understand both in varying degrees of success.

I was disappointed by this. Oh, it is great fun goofing on any politician, the more smarmy and sanctimonious the better. But I can get political goofs by the dump truck load from elsewhere. What I expected was something as gently incisive as, say, "Doonesbury," but with the cinematic skills we know Sayles has. Something as gentle and sharp as "tanner on Tanner."

We have three threads here. The first is the depiction of the system, the handlers and supporters that "make" a president. We all know how it is; many politicians admit it and nearly all journalists report on it. There isn't a shred of newness in this thread, and surely not out of Dreyfuss.

There's a second component having to do with the story that wraps the thing. Now here is where I expected some art. What we end up with a single big corporation as the bad guy, no, beyond that a single corporate man. Then we see how his misdeeds unravel a bit. Sure, we have payoffs, bribery, rampant disregard for the environment and a cover-up.

But see. The thing to make fun of is how some reduce big complex issues to simple narratives. How they take a million threads of a complex tapestry with inscrutable hues and patterns and reduce it to a paper towel with flag patterns. So why do the same thing when satirizing them? Why? It isn't as if there aren't people in the film world incapable of doing this? Or was it just a rush job?

Most people let all that slip because Chris Cooper's version is too delicious. Here's the problem with this: its not disturbing enough. The thing with the target's speech is how he needs to have his mouth work, but his mind cannot produce the coherent thought fast enough, so it looks for stored phrases and tries to evaluate them for appropriateness on the fly. This gives both odd pauses and sometimes goofy leaps in concepts and metaphors.

Listen to Cooper and pay attention to the leaps. Both are fabricated for dramatic effect. The pauses are regular. They're not even, but they have multiples: pause, twice as long three times as long. And they have a rhythm that if you listen makes a sort of sense.

Now look at the linguistic leaps. They have the same patterns, regular semantic distances. That's because we as viewers have to be in on the joke. We know he will jump and precisely how far. We just don't know the direction. See, humor is in the unexpected and in order for it to work, you need to set expectations.

Now, dear reader, listen to the target. He is not creating something as art, he is just living. What you will find is a well-studied artifact of a man whose cognitive centers have been damaged by cocaine saturation. There is no regularity. Pauses are random. The semantic distances are random. That's the whole point. This is what you find in substance abusers. Always. It is not dumbness but drug damage.

Oddly the National Institutes of Health had a great research program on this because all sorts of conditions like Alzheimers can be diagnosed by measuring these speech effects. But once the link was make to cocaine users, the program was terminated. Now that would make a good movie, Huh?

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.