| SILVER CITY |
 2004 - USADirector: John Sayles - Reviewed by Vickie
Set in Colorado, the action (so to speak) centers on a dim-witted gubernatorial hopeful named Richard Pilager (Chris Cooper), who bears an uncanny similarity to a certain U.S. president. Pilager is largely clueless, and his rabid puppetmaster of a campaign manager (Richard Dreyfuss) does everything he can to ensure his candidate comes off well whenever there's a camera trained on him. Things get a little complicated, though, when Pilager accidentally reels in a dead body during a commercial shoot at a tranquil lake. Conspiracy theories begin to spring forth—someone planted the body as a way of sullying Pilager's campaign! There's a cover-up of some nefarious activities! Who knows. But private investigator Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston) is hired to find out where the body came from and why. He's put on the trail of assorted perceived enemies of the Pilager family to weed out any potential suspects. In the process, he's reunited with his lost love (Maria Bello), a journalist covering the gubernatorial race, and later gets a little frisky with a bow-and-arrow-wielding Daryl Hannah, who co-stars as Pilager's estranged sister. The remainder of the film is a murder mystery, but it fails to make the case of the fishy body compelling. I didn't really care about the corpse or its origins. Even less so once the identity of the deceased was revealed. The investigation was slow and meandering and, while I appreciate Sayles' knack for creating interesting characters, I wasn't particularly taken with anyone onscreen. I did like Maria Bello's spunky Nora but she, like Tim Roth (!) as an underground eco-warrior, winds up underused. Again. (Note to Bello's agent: how about finding her a part where she gets to have more than twelve lines?) The two leads are solid enough, with Cooper edging out Huston (of the Huston filmmaking dynasty that includes father John and sister Anjelica) by a hair as the stronger player. Cooper makes for an almost-endearing buffoon, whose naiveté results in a few big laughs in the film. Huston, meanwhile, is appropriately rumpled as a P.I. whose life has kind of gone down the tubes of late. But, as much as it pains me to say it, I was really bored. The film's beefy 2+ hours running time didn't help, either. As the story plodded along, my eyelids got increasingly heavy and, when I feared I was a moviegoing wuss for not embracing the film, I looked around only to see that the woman next to me had also nodded off. Maybe it was the nature of the story, maybe it was the lack of a strong female presence onscreen, maybe it was just because I was already sleepy, but Silver City didn't wow me the way some of Sayles' films have in the past. I remained conflicted as the closing credits rolled, so I'm giving the movie a sitting-on-the-fence rating of four. |
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Conflicted. That's how I felt as I settled in for the latest film from
director John Sayles. I really like Sayles' work, but I'd read the
synopsis for Silver City and feared it wouldn't strike my fancy.
