Back in the days when what is now Air America radio was just a gleam in the eye of Sheldon and Anita Drobny, the conventional wisdom was that liberal talk radio would never work, because liberals have no sense of humor. They cited the egghead ephemera of All Things Considered on NPR, and the hodgepodge of the assorted Grievances of the Oppressed on the various Pacifica stations as an example. Of course, we know now that with a stable of funny, clever personalities, Air America has found its stride after a rocky beginning, and is now on in 29 markets plus online streaming over the Web and via satellite radio. This proves that liberals do, in fact, have a sense of humor. If only John Sayles had allowed more of it to come through in his new film SILVER CITY.

SILVER CITY begins promisingly enough, as the syntactically-challenged Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper), hand-picked gubernatorial candidate of Colorado's robber baron developers and son of its most business-friendly senator, is shooting an environmental spot for his campaign. Shootus interruptus occurs when Pilager casts his line into the clean waters of a Rocky Mountain lake and pulls up a corpse. Pilager's paranoid and ruthless campaign manager (Richard Dreyfuss in the Karl Rove role) is convinced that the body is a plant designed to sabotage the campaign. He hires journalist-turned-investigator Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston) to find which of the Pilager family's many enemies he's certain is behind what he's equally certain is the planting of the body in the lake.

Along the way, Danny encounters his former journalism colleague Mitch Paine (Tim Roth), his journalist ex-girlfriend Nora Allardyce (Maria Bello), who is now engaged to a sleazy lobbyist with the inevitable moniker Chandler Tyson (Billy Zane, sneering his way through yet another Snidely Whiplash role), right-wing radio host Cliff Castleton (Miguel Ferrer), former EPA crusader and Rove...er... Raven -- victim Casey Lyle, and Maddy Pilager (Daryl Hannah), the Neil Bush of the Pilager family, who has spent much of her life doing whatever is necessary to ruin the family's reputation.

SILVER CITY is in many ways a typical John Sayles film in that it is an ensemble piece featuring terrific performances by a huge parade of well-known actors pontificating about the evils of overdevelopment. But whereas Sunshine State had a series of interweaving stories involving reasonably well-developed characters (with Tim Hutton in the Danny O'Brien role, touching upon the lives of each of them), SILVER CITY is never quite sure where it wants to go.

Much of the problem is that George W. Bush, as embodied by Dickie Pilager, is just too big and too tempting a target, even though Sayles' script manages to stay just this side of cruelty in its characterization of a dim wastrel in way over his head. For George W. Bush doesn't just misspeak, his misstatements manifest in a particular way, often in the form of what appear to be some seriously strange Freudian slips. From saying that our enemies "...never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we" to asserting that "In a changing world, we want more people to have control over your own life" to his concern that as a result of malpractice insurance costs, OB/GYNs aren't able to "practice their love with women all across this country", these malapropisms would be funny if they weren't so appalling. In scripting Dickie Pilager's similar butchery of the English language, Sayles strips away the Freudian weirdness and leaves the kid-who-didn't-do-his-homework cluelessness intact: “keeping the infrastructure in place, where it belongs, is a priority...In those matters which are of less of a… not that they're not important, but if you're gonna have a front burner, which is where you want your priorities, it's like cooking. There needs to be something sittin' on the back one. And that's where your other organizations, your church people and your organizations formed to help these things will be happy to pitch in if only government would get out of their way."

Once the film gets past Dickie's malapropisms, the characters don't so much speak to each other as spout polemics at each other and at the audience. Ralph Waite rants about mine safety. Daryl Hannah, who looks better than ever as Maddy Pilager, and is clearly designed to be Jenna Bush Twenty years On, rants about growing up in a family of conservative hypocrites. Tim Roth rants about selling out as a journalist. Danny Huston, who as the investigator Danny O'Brien, is involved in all of the subplots, rants about all of them.

If SILVER CITY were simply a thinly-veiled spoof of George W. Bush, it might have worked better despite the fact of the subject being the biggest, easiest target around, largely due to Chris Cooper's gentle but spot-on performance, in which he manages to convey the Zen of George W. Bush without turning him into a pinata. The right is, of course, upset about SILVER CITY, as it does in fact poke fun at Their Guy, but writer/director Sayles is clearly more sad than angry. Dickie isn't a villain, he's simply the pawn who's surrounded and manipulated by the real villains -- Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofferson), the corporate raider who never saw a piece of wilderness he didn't want to take over, the aforementioned Chandler Tyson, who writes legislation to benefit his clients, Dickie's father Jud (Michael Murphy, in a nod to Robert Altman's Tanner '88 series), whose own ruthlessness predates the story told in this film, and of course, the Rasputin-like Chuck Raven, who like the man who is his prototype, is living a vicarious life through the cowboy of his own creation whose career he's promoting.

But alas, surrounding what could have been a good, pointed piece of satire is a convoluted plot that requires the characters to explain it relentlessly, one involving exploited Hispanic migrant workers, gonzo web journalists like Tim Roth's Mitch Paine and Thora Birch's young assistant who look as if just stepped onto the set from the road company of The Invisible Circus, evil real estate developers, polluters, and just plain Republicans in general. SILVER CITY is a perfect example of "Pacifica Left-itis"; the unfortunate tendency of certain elements of the left to turn every rally, every event into a catch-all of lefty grievances: stop the war, end racism and sexism, justice for Palestine, and the inevitable cry of "Free Mumia!" All this noise dilutes the message of whatever the function of the event is to the point it has absolutely no effect on what it's trying to change. There's plenty to be angry about in the archetypes Sayles has created in this film, but in tossing them all up on screen at the same time, the end result is just the same old cacophony of grieviances.

-- Jill Cozzi

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