| LEFT BEHIND : "John Sayles'" 'Silver City' [3/10] |
|
|
| Saturday, 06 August 2005 | |
|
Of all the low tricks perpetrated by the current incumbents of the White House, this one really takes the mouldy cheese: the appearance on our arthouse screens of a film entitled Silver City - written, directed and edited, we are asked to believe, by "John Sayles." But anyone who has seen and enjoyed the films made by the real Mr Sayles (a list which includes minor masterpieces like City of Hope and Lone Star, alongside more flawed but nevertheless worthwhile projects as Matewan and Limbo) won't take long to see through this elaborate subterfuge clearly intended to discredit one of the left's standard-bearing icons. In synopsis, Silver City does indeed sound like a Sayles movie: it even references Lone Star by beginning with the discovery of a dead body, the ensuing investigation revealing all manner of political and economic skullduggery in an American backwater. This time we're in rural Colorado, stamping-ground of a powerful, Bush-like, Republican clan named the Pilagers. Jud (Michael Murphy) is the veteran local Senator, who's long been in close cahoots with shady billionaire Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofferson) on projects such as the environmentally-disastrous new lakeside housing development, Silver City. Nearing retirement, Jud is preoccupied with grooming his genial but dim-bulb son Dickie (Chris Cooper) to become the state's next Governor. The campaign is managed by ruthless operator Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss), and all goes well until Dickie accidentally 'hooks' a floating corpse while filming a folksy lakeside campaign-ad. Switching into damage-limitation mode, Raven hires ex-journalist Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston) to find out which of the Pilagers' many enemies might have planted the body in the lake with a view to discrediting the candidate... Scriptwriter "Sayles" makes his (her? their?) first gaffe with the character names - as if the real John Sayles would give such an eco-unfriendly politico a moniker as galumphingly obvious as 'Pilager'! And what about calling the nasty spin-doctor Raven? Or having the dead body, who metaphorically 'comes back to life' to haunt his killer(s), turn out to be one Lazaro (i.e. Lazarus) Huerta?! The brains-trust behind Silver City may have scanned a cursory briefing on Sayles' previous career, but they clearly learned nothing about how he paces his pictures, and how nimbly he conveys his intelligent political points while also crafting an entertainingly watchable thriller/drama/comedy. Silver City, in stark contrast, is two of the longest hours you'll spend in a cinema this year - the episodic plot rambles along inconsequentially as Danny pieces together what turns out to be a very underwhelming jigsaw, and the drab cinematography (cheekily credited to veteran lenser/director Haskell Wexler) contributes to the mood of sluggish torpor. Silver City proceeds with the funereal pace of a tub being thumped - a sour caricature of the energetic beat that propels genuinely political, engaged film-making. Daryl Hannah provides a brief interlude of interest as Dickie's maverick sister Maddy, but even her cameo is cruelly torpedoed by a head-scratching line of dialogue - she says she's practising her archery with a view to taking part in the "2004 Olympics," and since we've been told that George W Bush is the President, the 'action' must presumably be unfolding in 2001 or 2002. But there's no attempt to be 'topical' and use this time-setting for any productive purpose. Like so much in Silver City (including the clunky, Godardian Pilager-campaign intertitles that punctuate proceedings) this seems quite bafflingly sloppy - until you remember that this can't really be a John Sayles film. Nevertheless, hats off to whoever went to the bother of cooking up this ersatz affair - it can't have been easy marshalling a cast so full of (largely) left-leaning minor stars: as well as Kristofferson and Nashville veteran Murphy (who, in yet another annoying blunder, looks nothing like old enough to be Cooper's dad), the ensemble includes Billy Zane, Tim Roth, Thora Birch, Miguel Ferrer, Ralph Waite and Maria Bello. But those wily Republicans get the last laugh by either giving these luminaries little to do, or else filling their mouths with duff "dialogue" - nothing like the sharp lingo familiar from proper Sayles pictures. And what a stroke of genius to give the most screen time to such a charisma-free zone as Danny Huston - his presence just one of numerous elements recalling, in a comparison which is emphatically not to Silver City's favour, Roman Polanski's Chinatown. Cooper's Dickie Pilager, meanwhile, is perhaps the biggest giveaway of the lot. George W Bush should be, in a way, every liberal film-maker's dream target - and no doubt many fans of the real Sayles were eager to see this bogeyman gleefully skewered by their infuriated hero. Instead, "Sayles" delivers an attack with all the force of one of the film's numerous pollution-poisoned fish. Rather than having the President quaking in his boots, the results are more likely to have him chuckling smugly inside his ostrich-skin Tony Lamas. Neil Young |
| < Prev |
|---|
