silver city (2004)
In an election year, a political satire from John Sayles should be something to get excited about. The guy is so cool he had a guest spot on MathNet, for heaven’s sake. It is particularly tempting to get excited when that film has a terrific trailer and a cast that includes the likes Thora Birch and Richard Dreyfus. But I’m warning you now - do not get excited about this film. It’s the most disappointing thing since your last really bad date.
I would tell you about the plot, but you wouldn’t care, and the strain of trying to make enough sense of it to not sound like a madman would make me tetchy. It’s convoluted and needlessly intricate, needless chiefly because there’s not a single character here engaging enough to care about one way or the other. The writing is remarkable only for its rigorous insistence on a maximum two-dimension per character limit. God bless the actors, who do their best, but even the considerable talent of Richard Dreyfuss can’t make this ordeal of a script any more watchable.
Perhaps what’s most frustrating about the movie is how well it starts: we begin with gubernatorial candidate Dickie Pilager shooting an asinine political ad, trying to get the hang of a rod and reel in an effort to look down home. When the only thing he manages to catch is a dead body, things take a promising turn, although Sayles manages to kill off any sort of dramatic interest or enjoyment in pretty short order.
Chris Cooper’s character, Dickie Pilager, is surely one of the lowlights of the movie, although that’s a very tight race. He’s an obvious swipe at George Bush - basically, the whole joke is that the politician isn’t very smart, and isn’t very good with words. What small bit of satire exists in the film is not very artfully done, and is, in any case, a joke everyone in the western world has heard relentlessly for the past four years. In a general sense, I think I probably agree with the political message of the film, but I still found myself wishing he had just kept quiet unless he could have come up with something a little more clever and original to say.
The film is not without funny moments, but these mainly come when the writing is so bad the only real option is to laugh out loud. In particular, Sayles has a bad habit of making characters announce their thoughts. My favorite moment was when one of the protagonists, walking away from an interview with the bad guy, announces to no one in particular “I think he’s lying!” as the baddie stands in the background, stroking his goatee. I’m not kidding - it’s that bad. And you can tell he’s the bad guy, because he’s wearing ostrich skin boots.
Aesthetically, the film has all of the visual charm of an old episode of Murder, She Wrote; it looks absolutely stuck in the 1980’s. The addition of Jessica Fletcher could have only helped this film, however - and it would have been a lot less insufferable with a running time of 53 minutes.
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