John Sayles’ Scathing Silver City Muckrakes on Bush Turf

by Andrew Sarris

John Sayles’ Silver City fires yet another cinematic salvo across the bow of the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Ashcroft ship of state, which seems to be steaming ahead toward yet another stolen election. In paying his populist-progressive dues, Mr. Sayles has inscribed his own thematic signature on Silver City, his 15th feature film in a muckraking quarter of a century that began with the low-budget Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980), a film that captured the passion and pathos of the youthful anti-Vietnam War movement more persuasively than any other film of its time.

The frequently heard rap on Mr. Sayles then and ever since was that his heart was in the right place, but his mise en scène was just wrong. And though the intelligently articulate dialogue he wrote for his characters should’ve been more appreciated, it was instead damned with faint praise as proof that Mr. Sayles was too glib to bother being "cinematic"-which nowadays means visual illiteracy embellished with expensive special effects.

Nonetheless, Silver City does seem more like the work of a nuanced novelist than of a dynamic visual and dramatic talent. Instead, there is a familiar sobriety to the film that attests to Mr. Sayles’ deep respect for all his characters; the good, the shady and the poor wretches caught in between. Throughout his career, Mr. Sayles has displayed a special concern for losers in a market that pays top dollar for fantasies about winners.

Silver City’s Danny O’Brien (Danny Huston) is a case in point. Caught in a setup, poor Danny is fired not once but twice; first in his job as a crusading reporter against official corruption, and then as an establishment investigator hired by the Karl Rove-like Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss). Mr. Raven is the campaign manager for Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper), a George W. Bush-like dim bulb and son of Senator Judson Pilager (Michael Murphy). The Pilager dynasty, we learn, has pillaged the Colorado environment for generations. So when a lakeside campaign commercial for Dickie Pilager backfires-he hooks a human corpse during a fly-fishing trip-Chuck Raven suspects dirty tricks by the opposition, and hires Danny O’Brien to check up on some anti-Pilager hotheads and warn them that they’re being watched. But during the course of his assignment, Danny stumbles across a bothersome murder mystery implicating the powers-that-be in a tangled web of corporate malfeasance and police corruption.

Of course, when using allegorical names like "Pilager" and "Raven" (and "Dickie"), one is already on the verge of cartoonish caricature of one’s political adversaries. But Mr. Sayles possesses too subtle a sensibility to make the enemy completely ridiculous. Hence, Dickie may be a little slow on the uptake and a little maladroit in his unrehearsed comments to the press and the public, but he is never a complete nitwit, any more than is our own George W. Bush. In fact, Silver City ends with Raven and his candidate about to emerge triumphant with the help of crooked law enforcement, ruthless corporate behavior and a public gullible enough to swallow Dickie Pilager’s poison-pill cure for all our social ills with the magic word, "privatization"-which here is concerned with "liberating" the natural wilderness from the hobbling regulations of pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington.

I must express some strong reservations about Mr. Sayles’ treatment of the neo-noir elements in his film. These involve the somewhat confusing discoveries of human-rights violations against illegal Mexican immigrants, and the violation of obscure environmental and worker-safety standards in mining the silver that gives the film its title. Mr. Sayles indulges in too many cryptic conversations of a paranoid nature-people talking about selling out or not selling out to some unseen and seemingly invincible force. The sci-fi elements are not surprising, considering that Mr. Sayles has dabbled in the subject both as a screenwriter and writer-director. It’s not a surprise either that Mr. Sayles doesn’t take the other side-political activists-at face value; indeed, he leaves open the possibility that the slick, smooth evildoers are driving men and women of conscience stark raving mad.

In many ways, Silver City is Mr. Sayles’ most pessimistic film since Limbo (1999), which had a dangerously unresolved and utterly depressing ending. This time around, I’m already depressed by the direction political campaigning has taken, using the Big Lie as a campaign tactic for a susceptible public and a compliant press that has ignored its mission of truth-seeking investigative journalism. (Thank God for Michael Moore, Jon Stewart and several comic strips, not including the pernicious and fallacious Fillmore.) In this context, Mr. Sayles seems to have intended Silver City as a wake-up call to all us potentially complacent anti-Bushites. He needn’t have gone to all the trouble of alerting us, since everything I read and hear from our side is full of doom and gloom. As it happens, the grotesque spectacle provided by both Chris Cooper’s Dickie Pilager and George W. Bush’s George W. Bush is painful to watch in light of its apparent success at mass persuasion.

In the realm of nuance, Mr. Sayles is capable of making distinctions between various shadings of right-wing ideology. Thus, one of Dickie’s and Chuck’s most bothersome antagonists is an even nuttier, ultra-conservative radio motormouth, Cliff Castleton (Miguel Ferrer), who finds Dickie too "liberal" for his taste. Another thorn in Chuck’s side is Dickie’s flaky sister, Maddy Pilager (Daryl Hannah), who is on the outs with her whole family and everything it stands for, though her behavior is much too erratic and drug-induced to do anything damaging. Except, that is, to our foolish protagonist, Danny, who allows himself to be seduced by the irresponsible Maddy, and who then gets fired by Chuck after Maddy boasts of her conquest to him. I frankly didn’t know what to make of this turn of events: Is Mr. Sayles suggesting that the opposition to the predators is so fragmented and eccentric that there is no hope of stopping them? If so, why bother raising a stink on-screen over the inevitable? Yet that is precisely what Mr. Sayles does with his final, apocalyptic image of dead fish floating on a corporation-polluted lake. Dickie is seemingly on his way to the governor’s mansion, and all is well with the predatory Pilagers. I can only hope that Mr. Sayles is being unduly pessimistic, but hope is fading with every turn of the news cycle. There is nothing to do but pray for some last-minute redemption of our land from the better-organized kleptocrats in our midst, be they the stooges at Harken Energy or Halliburton or the hordes of overcompensated C.E.O.’s across the length and breadth of our ravaged landscape.

http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=9558