Fictional candidate weighs into US election

Film shows that when it comes to satire, Moore is not the only show in town

by Dan Glaister in Los Angeles

In the current US election season, Dickie Pilager’s website stands out as a model of clarity and vision. Here is the candidate standing before a view of the mountains and lakes of his native Colorado, extolling the virtues of the outdoor life. Here is the family man, praising family life and the American way. And here is the nitty-gritty of his campaign: his views on healthcare, education, gun control, abortion and the environment.

Like many other candidates, Dickie Pilager has learned a lesson from Howard Dean and his army of Deaniacs; his website is about involvement, providing a virtual forum for supporters to meet likeminded souls.

But there is one aspect in which Mr Pilager is different to most of the other candidates in this election season: he is a work of fiction.

Dickie is the lead character in Silver City, a political drama made by the veteran film director John Sayles, which is due to be released in the US today. Made with a budget of just $5.5m (about £3m), the film boasts an ensemble cast of Sayles regulars, including Chris Cooper, Daryl Hannah, Richard Dreyfuss, Kris Kristofferson, Thora Birch and Tim Roth.

While documentary makers, with Michael Moore at the forefront, have led cinema’s response to the current political mood, narrative films have been slower off the mark. But Sayles has made up for lost time. The director, best known for Lone Star, Limbo and Sunshine State, was prompted to make Silver City by what he saw when filming in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.

He told the website Comingsoon.net: "Many people on our crew and in the community asked, what was the deal with the national media? They’re not covering the real story down here, which is not these hanging chads, it’s how many African-Americans did not get to vote.

"I’ve felt like our democracy was under attack from various sides, and it was important to get something out before the election."

For a director renowned for the subtlety of his films, Sayles’s chosen tool was decidedly blunt: satire. Silver City tells the story of the bumbling wayward son of a political dynasty, unable to think on his feet, let alone string a sentence together, who is anointed as the candidate by the business interests that run the state of Colorado.

Played by Cooper, most recently seen in The Bourne Identity, Dickie is a dead ringer for George W Bush, from the hesitant bewilderment of his grin to his protean ability to mangle words. His campaign slogan is "Honesty, integrity, articulacy".

"We have to get our priorities straight," he tells an impromptu gathering of reporters in one scene. "Education is a priority. Healthcare is a priority. Our economy is a priority. The environmental... the whole environmental arena, that’s a priority, a big priority."

Sayles has not denied the similarity to Bush, saying that Pilager was modelled on the political neophyte when he first ran for governor of Texas.

But his target, he claims, is not so much Bush as the system, and his aim is to prompt voters to make the connection between the often incompetent politicians who lead them and the interests that got them elected and direct their energies.

Sayles argues that the real villain of the piece is not the candidate but the big businessman, played by Kris Kristofferson. There is, he told National Public Radio in the US, "a question for all of us, which is: Do we expect our candidates, do we expect our public officials... to actually be people who know anything, who can govern? Or do we expect them to just be mascots for the people who are really running things?"

While the film is unlikely to preach beyond its converted base - Sayles labours under the tag "liberal film-maker" - Fahrenheit 9/11 has shown that the impact of a film can be considerable in such a hard-fought election. Already Silver City has attracted the opprobrium of one bastion of conservatism, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Network, which named it - along with Michael Moore’s film and the environmental disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow - Hollywood’s contribution to the John Kerry campaign.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1306446,00.html