Movies into Film

Silver City

Directed by John Sayles

USA, 2004

Cooper as Candidate Pilager (Photo: Newmarket)

John Sayles’ Silver City begins sublimely with the piercing voice of Margo Timmins in an a cappella arrangement of “Mining for Gold,” the traditional folk tune that leads the Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Session.

The elegiac edge in Timmins’ husky voice and the physical degradation from hard labor that the lyrics describe usher in a tone of great expectation: Has Sayles made a film to match the song’s emotional currency? “Can’t you feel the rock dust in your lungs? It’ll cut down a miner when he is still young.”

Not only is it good to hear Timmins again (reminding me of a time when I still paid attention to pop music) this opening credits sequence conveys in non-visual terms how something straightforward and pure can have its essential nature altered or made unfailingly complicated. The audio design gradually mixes “Mining for Gold” with static, newscast sound bytes, beeping noises, the aural detritus of contemporary political campaigns.

And then we meet the movie’s iconic anti-hero, Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dicky Pilager, a puppet controlled by anti-environmentalists. Played by Chris Cooper in an inspired comic turn, Dicky Pilager, make no mistake, is George W. Bush—perpetual smirk, aphasiac phrase-making, open-mouthed nincompoopery and all. Much as Bush had never held elected office until becoming governor of Texas, Silver City’s Pilager is also a political novice, and like Bush, an out-and-out moron who would be nowhere sans family connections.

Cooper campaigns in Silver City (Photo: Newmarket Films)

Critics (Frank Rich, for one) who found Jonathan Demme’s clumsy, vanilla re-working of Manchurian Candidate to be “partisan” will probably feel broadsided by Silver City. (I still maintain that the rave reviews garnered by Demme’s worthless remake amount to nothing more than the wishful thinking of nervous liberals.) Outside of Fahrenheit 9/11 or Uncovered, Sayles’ film is the most open cinematic attack yet on the Bush Administration in particular and the disastrous effects of Republican malfeasance on American culture in general. Alas, Silver City manages to be an important movie without ever truly being a good one.

Structure and casting have something to do with this. Dicky Pilager isn’t the main character; he’s merely an ensemble player. And Sayles conceives Silver City as a neo-noir as much as a political satire, therefore necessitating the need for a gumshoe. For his Sam Spade, Sayles inexplicably cast the grossly untalented Danny Huston, whose performance is every bit as dim as Cooper’s is brilliant.

Baggy-eyed, large-featured yet fay, with a feminine curve to his lips, Huston suggests an untoward crossbreed of Mark Ruffalo and Fred Gwynne. Huston’s private investigator, also named Danny, has a relentless, amused laugh; a smug smile; an unbearable sense of being achingly pleased with himself; and when he says, “C’mon, I’ve got professional ethics,” it’s with all the spontaneity of a wax museum dummy. Huston appears in almost every scene, and he brings the film down.

Richard Dreyfuss as a campaign manager; Michael Murphy as a U.S. Senator (Photo: Newmarket)

Its flaws notwithstanding, Silver City should be seen. Though Sayles’ dialogue veers between cliché and biting commentary, his script captures the peculiar tensions of our time. The beautiful Maria Bello, sporting dark wireless frames, her long blond hair elegantly pulled back in a twist, plays a reporter who covers the Pilager campaign. Bello’s Nora stands in for every disenchanted journalist who finds herself “a part of the entertainment business.” In a backstory that requires effusive exposition, we’re to know that she wrote for the local paper “…when it was still political,” a paper subsequently rendered faceless by communications monopolies. At a cocktail party for candidate Pilager (the family manse and grounds resemble the Cloisters Museum in New York’s Fort Tryon Park), there’s a sense of enclosing depression. Sayles never makes it explicit: Nora mourns what corporate media ownership hath wrought, the squashing of dissent or much of anything else in our timid dailies—or, for that matter, in pallid near-identical alt-weeklies. At the same party, Kris Kristofferson, as a mine owner/media magnate who fuels Pilager’s bid for governor, says to Huston, “Americans don’t have the patience for underdogs like they used to. Make people feel like they’re part of a winner, they’ll follow you anywhere,” a statement that pretty much encapsulates the bandwagon appeal of Reagan/Bush fascism.

The characters in Silver City (there are too many of them) don’t have the breathing room of Sayles’ creations in the still flawed, but much better Sunshine State. Most of the figures here are too enmeshed in plot to emerge as human beings. There are a few gems, nonetheless.

Michael Murphy makes the most of his two scenes as Senator Jud Pilager, the proud papa of Dicky. Although Murphy’s too closely identified with East Coast liberalism to be wholly acceptable as a Rocky Mountain conservative, his distinctively reedy voice (a pleasure to hear) reinforces the vocal colorlessness of so many younger actors. The very bald Billy Zane, a case in point, speaks as if a molasses-laden object were embedded in his throat. As a lobbyist paid to love the exigencies of enterprise, Zane slowly coughs up the film’s dopiest line: “Power is a locomotive; you can get on board or stay off the tracks.”

Alma Delfina is excellent as a cleaning woman who translates the Spanish of migrant workers in Danny’s far-flung investigations, and Daryl Hannah as the Pilager family black sheep (i.e. a liberal) has a lovely moment with her dreadlocked, mulatto honey of an illegitimate child, whom she encourages to write songs about mother-son relationships, “like Eminem.”

Haskell Wexler, now in his early 80s, photographed the movie. In an indelible autumn image, a red leather sofa kept outdoors faces a thin forest of leafless aspen trees.

Yet it’s Cooper’s spot-on Bushisms that loiter in the memory. Improvising his way through a Denver press conference, Dicky positions himself as the pro-education, anti-drug candidate by saying, “Junior can’t read if he’s high on crack. The air is thin enough up here.” And in a later speech, he promises voters “…freedom from cultural demagoguery under the false banner of environmental correctness,” a line that cuts to what a deeply schizoid mess America is in. – NPT

August 2004

Movies into Film

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