MOVIE CRITIQUE:
John Sayles is one of my very favorite directors with an independent film resumé consisting of such classic films as "Lone Star," "Sunshine State," and "Passion Fish." Some might also include his "Limbo" in this grouping, but I don't, even though it was still an interesting effort on his part. Unfortunately, his two most recent films, "Casa de Los Babys" and now "Silver City," have both turned out to be critical and perhaps even commercial failures.

This is a shame, for Sayles is one of those rare breed of film makers whose efforts fully and completely reflect their own personal vision of the story being filmed, as he is the director, the screenwriter, and the editor of his films.

This movie has the topicality of the bumbling son of a respected Senator from Colorado running for governor of that state and being managed by a Machiavellian handler and for this reason it bears more than a little resemblance to the current President George W. Bush and his inner circle of advisors.

Chris Cooper, who also starred in "Lone Star," now plays the bumbling son of an elderly Coloradan Senator and rainmaker who wants to have his none-too-qualified son succeed him in the political arena. The son, who was known as "Dim Dickie" while a student in college, speaks with malapropisms and mangles his syntax, all of which create an all too easy comparison with our current nation's President, George W. Bush.

Furthermore, Dickie Pilager has as the manager of his election campaign the very image of the bete noir of all Liberals, a Colorado version of Karl Rove. In this movie the man is known as Chuck Raven and his role is played with a deliciously over the top bravado by the actor, Richard Dreyfuss. Pilager even has a tall blonde woman in his inner circle of advisors who bears a superficial resemblance to longtime Bush confidante, Karen Hughes, but this cinematic character is much less of a powerhouse, both politically and intellectually, than Hughes.

In my estimation, Sayles, as a well known Liberal, has made too great an effort to get this film out into the 2004 political arena instead of sitting on it for a while and being more concerned with its effect on the cinematic arena. This movie cries out for better editing and a much tighter focus on the murder mystery instead of spending far too much time on the overtly political acts and antics of the bumbling, dimwitted gubernatorial candidate, Dickie Pilager.

Also note the less than subtle analogies in this movie. A candidate named Pilager ("Pillager," as in "rape and pillage," get it?) and an advisor named Raven, which not only rhymes with "craven" but is also the avian symbol of the dark unknown itself.

"Silver City" could have been a great movie if it had been less involved with the satire of President Bush and more involved with the corporate and political coverup of the murder of an illegal migrant worker.

Surprisingly enough, once I became involved in the movie I was far less concerned with Dickie Pilager's passing resemblance to many of President Bush's mannerisms than I was with the second story about the cover up of a murder, which was far more interesting.

The body turns up by getting "hooked" by Pilager in a tragically macabre photo op at a highly polluted lake resting at the base of a man made mountain of gold mining tailings filled with cyanide and other hazardous chemicals. In spite of this being an environmentally hazardous area, a local developer on the cheap wants to pass this lake off as prime real estate ripe for residential development.

There is the beginnings of a great murder mystery here along with an even more sordid tale of political and economic corruption, the abuse of migrant workers, the coverup of not one, but several crimes, and corporate malfeasance and greed operating on the highest levels, but this is a movie that we will never get to see...

"Silver City" is also a cynical movie where the good guys are flawed and the bad guys literally get away with murder. And everything else. In this movie, crime does pay.
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MOVIE SYNOPSIS:
It is a beautiful clear day where they say you can see forever in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Colorado gubernatorial candidate, Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper), is dressed up in his Bass Pro Shop fishing fatigues and sporting a fishing rod, all at the ready to catch a "big one" in this small lake that would be pretty if it weren't for the slag heaps of gold mining tailings that surround it.

Dickie Pilager is the son of the long time Colorado Senator, Judson Pilager (Michael Murphy), a man who became wealthy and has served his state and perhaps even himself for many years in the Senate. He lives in a castle on a mountain top overlooking his vast ranch where he now plots the political career of his son, a man whom even he admits is a "disaster" as a political candidate.

Pilager's intellectual shortcomings aside, he is still viewed as an attractive candidate because of his name and because of the fact that his conservative underpinnings provide fertile ground for antigovernment suggestions to be thrown into his empty head by a former tobacco lobbyist, Chandler Tyson (Billy Zane) and the state's industrial bigwig, Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofferson), a long time friend of the family. Every turn that is made now in Colorado discovers another "Benteen this or that" company as Wes has his hands in every piece of the Colorado business soil.

Dickie's political manager, Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss), is a control freak who wants everything to be perfect for the start of the photo op shoot in 45 minutes when the press is due to show up. He even chides a campaign worker for making a bright red fishing lure that is too large for use as a casting prop.

The candidate casts a few times into the lake when he hooks what he thinks will be a "big one." He pulls and he pulls at what he thinks is a fish which does not seem to be giving much ground is its fight to remain free. Slowly, however, he begins to make progress in reeling in his trophy catch. The members of the campaign staff all stare expectantly at the lake, waiting for the fish to break the surface.

Something breaks the surface of the lake, but it is too heavy and slow moving to be a lively bait fish. Pilager continues to reel in the catch when Raven looks out and observes that there is something dreadfully wrong with this catch. His suspicions prove to be correct as Pillager's hook pulls the arm of a dead man out of the water.

Raven rushes the nonessential members of the staff off to a new location and tells his assistant to call the press and change the location of the shoot to another nearby lake. The body is wrapped in a tarp and placed on a truck with the driver being instructed to deliver it in utmost secrecy to the local morgue. A few upper echelon members of the campaign staff stand idly around while Raven wonders aloud whether this body is the result of some natural occurrence or a plant in a macabre joke made by some of Pilager's political enemies.

Grace Seymour (Mary Kay Place) is at her desk in the office of her detective agency when the call comes in from Raven to investigate the circumstances surrounding the occurrence of the body in the lake. She calls in one of her investigators, Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston), to take charge of the investigation.

Danny O'Brien was a former investigative journalist for a crusading Rocky Mountain newspaper. A lead he was investigating turned out to be an explosive exposé as well as front page news. However, when the story was published, one of the leads disappeared and the other denied ever saying anything to him and the newspaper was sued for libel. The newspaper lost the libel case and Danny lost his job because he hadn't recorded any of the confessions.

He was not the only casualty as his editor, Mitch Paine (Tim Roth), was also fired from the newspaper. Paine now publishes nameless exposés without attribution on his personal web site a la Matt Drudge in an effort to get the conversation directed towards the suspected malfeasant of the moment.

O'Brien and Paine have remained in touch and occasionally use each other for sources. Paine has an assistant, Karen Cross (Thora Birch), who favors nose jewelry, and the two work out of a seedy lower level office in the best tradition of poverty stricken, muckraking journalists.

Danny O'Brien is really the hero and the lead character in "Silver City," flawed though he is as an individual. The loss of his job sent him into a downward psychological spiral in which he considered himself to be a "loser." The sad effect of this was the breakup of his long term relationship with Nora Allardyce (Maria Bello), a fellow reporter who stayed on with the newspaper after he left. Now that she has moved on, she has added insult to injury by becoming engaged to the smooth talking but corrupt lobbyist, Chandler Tyson (Billy Zane), who has just signed on with Pilager as an advisor to his campaign.

Chuck Raven had given the names of three "suspects" for planting the body in the lake to Danny O'Brien, suspects that he is supposed to look up and casually mention that they are being "investigated," that they are on a "list" as a less than subtle form of intimidation in the hopes of getting these three to back off.

The first is a small potatoes developer, a competitor of Wes Benteen named Cliff Castleton (Miguel Ferrar). He cannot hide his anger at the Benteen and Pillager families, but he is so open about his hostility that he seems to be an unlikely suspect.

The second is an elderly miner who has been forced out of the business and has lost everything. Casey Lyle (Ralph Waite) has been reduced to giving tours through an abandoned mine for any interested tourists that pass through the area. Danny gets some useful information from him about mine accidents when they fill with rainwater, but Lyle admits to him that he is too old and too tired to put up any kind of a fight anymore.

The third suspect is the estranged sister of Dickie Pilager, Maddy Pilagar (Darryl Hannah), an aspiring Olympics hopeful who has given up ice skating as her route to the gold in favor of archery, a sport at which even older athletes can succeed. Maddy had gotten pregnant while in high school and her father had shipped her off to California to bear the child as her plans for abortion in this heavily religious state would have ruined his political career. Maddy has never forgiven her father and she hates her brother as well. Surprisingly enough, her only close relationship is with her illegitimate son, now an adult and a recording producer.

But Danny suspects that none of these three have much to do with anything, much less dropping off a stiff in a lake at just the right place to be hooked by an aspiring politician. He independently decides that an investigation into the identity of the corpse would be a more fruitful area of endeavor.

Between Paine's suggestions and that of the mortician, who points out to O'Brien a very distinctive tattoo of a dragon on the back of the hand of the dead man, O'Brien now has enough information that points to this victim as having been an illegal alien.

His search for more leads proves fruitless until he stumbles across a Tony Guerra (Sal Lopez) in a bar frequented by Hispanics. Tony sports the same tattoo on his hand and he knew the victim as both men had gotten their tattoos at the same time. Danny hires Tony on the spot to be his investigator as he is not fluent in Spanish and, as an Anglo, he certainly would not be trusted by any members of the illegal alien community with a lot to hide even in ordinary circumstances.

Tony finds out that the victim had been hired by a surly and very vicious farm boss named Vince Esparza (Luis Saguar), but his efforts to dig further come to naught as Esparza catches wind of him and injures him in a fake car accident.

Danny visits his new found friend in the hospital and then is forced to go on his own with what little information that Guerra has given him. He does have the names of the two Mexican illegals as serious leads, so he hires the Hispanic office janitor of his detective agency to be his translator when he finally catches up with them.