SCREEN

SILVER CITY

Steve Bornfeld

This is an election year? Who knew? ... Yeah, OK. I knew. But I might've enjoyed Silver City, John Sayles' long, limp poli-satire, if I didn't. Or hadn't seen it done funnier, smarter, sharper and shorter.


Silver wants to be Bulworth, Wag the Dog, Primary Colors. They had the advantage of keeping moviegoers awake. Pile up a few more Dan Rathers and movies like this, and Bush is a cinch, even if Michael Moore and Linda Ronstadt set themselves on fire at the Aladdin.


Silver City wit: A candidate's dynastic family is named Pilager. (Pillagers!); A candidate is conferring with his spiritual adviser? "Oh, Jesus Christ"; Watching the candidate for Colorado governor on a muted TV, someone cracks: "He seems a lot more gubernatorial with the sound off"; Sample rhetoric: "Junior can't read if he's high on crack."


Flummoxed and foggy-headed, Chris Cooper is the brain-cell-lite candidate, Dicky (read: Dubya) Pilager, son of an esteemed senator (Michael Murphy). Dickie accidentally hooks a corpse while filming an environmental political ad. His crusty campaign manager (Richard Dreyfuss, in fidgety smartass mode), hires an ex-idealistic reporter-turned-schlumpy investigator (Danny Huston) to check out any links to Pilager family enemies, sending him into a morass of deception, sabotage, greed, revenge, conglomerates, environmental rapists, undocumented migrant workers, moneyed poli-puppeteers, yadda, yadda.


While several of the many marquee performers—Daryl Hannah, Miguel Ferrer, Kris Kristofferson—fleetingly hold the screen, Silver squanders them, hampered by Sayles' legendary low-flame style and pacing when the satiric setting needs to be at near-boil.


Satire succeeds as a fun-house mirror of absurdity, not a hand-held mirror of reality. What happens when the two pass each other coming and going? (Hey, all you Rather/CBS blogophiles—this movie features a website reporter!) Combine Sayles' underwhelming instinct for comic laceration here with the near self-parody of Campaign '04 and you've got a movie going the wrong way down a one-way street. Sure, films outlast elections, existing on their own artistic plane. But politics seem a permanent parody when 60 Minutes is ridiculed and The Daily Show is the stump stop du jour, making Silver City feel eternally dated. An old joke before it was ever new.


Politics is corrupt, amoral and absurd? No shit, Candidate Sherlock.

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