The Worst Film Ever

Pretty Good

An Exercise In Nonsense

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

"Silver City" is a John Sayles film from 2004 and stars Chris Cooper, Danny Huston, Maria Bello, Darryl Hannah, Richard Dreyfuss, and Mary Kay Place.Chris Cooper plays village idiot Dicky Pillager, a member of a political family. He's been put up for governor because he's malleable. While filming an ad for his campaign, during which he's fishing, he hooks onto a dead body. A journalist, Chuck Raven (Dreyfuss) hires an investigator (Huston) to identify the body and learn whether or not he has any connection to the politician.Set in Colorado, this is a pretty good movie that somehow failed to hold my interest. Others here complained about the end; I kind of liked the last half hour. Danny Huston is very good as the frustrated detective, and Darryl Hannah does a good job playing an eccentric.Nothing too surprising in this film, it's the usual political corruption, the needs of the few are more important than the needs of the many kind of film, but it has some strong scenes and some good acting.

John Sayles directs "Silver City", a well meaning but dumb attack on George Bush, powerless media types, morally bankrupt politicians, campaign managers, fear-mongers, government spin-doctors and evil corporations.The film takes the format of a classic noir (now a tradition incapable of mapping our increasingly complex world), our investigative hero uncovering dark truths as he progresses through Sayles' labyrinth, but everything is handled in a clunky manner, points made directly and obviously, the audience forced to sit back and passively take Sayles' lowbrow sermonizing.Sayles has always been a humourless director, so no surprise that his attempts at satire fall flat here. It also doesn't help that postmodernism is slowly killing off the critical function of satire. Today, all reality is already "satire", such that a whole new type of abstract distancing is required (which is why one of the few effective satires of today, "South Park", literally has to reduce its targets to cardboard cutouts).3/10 – One of Sayles' worst. Actor Chris Cooper, always wonderful in Sayles' films, makes some of it bearable, but it's not enough.

I believe Mr. Koch misses the point. I just saw this movie, though I had heard about it previously and wanted to see it. I had to check the date: 2004. This movie has the "truth of fiction," which means it has fictional characters and story to portray the absolutely scary political phenomena that we are living in. This is no exaggeration of what the Bush/Cheney/Rove administration are unfortunately, successfully bringing about in this country, under the guise of the same family, religion, market fundamentalism hype that is destroying our country, allowing the infrastructure to deteriorate, while rewarding their greedy corporate donors to benefit.

The problem with this movies is not that in tried to be a "Chinatown" clone or that it tried to spray the viewer with a lot of left-right political mumbo jumbo, but that it didn't know where it was going. Was it to be a political spoof mixed with satire or a serious political murder intrigue mystery? It actually worked best when it went in the direction of a political thriller. The two most effective scenes are the opening with the body in the water and the one in the morgue when the coroner is explaining some of the evidence concerning how the body got into the water in the first place. The campaign ads that flashed across the screen from time to time were not humorous but merely distracting.So much has been said about this film by IMDb critics that I only have one other observation. I thought the usually lackluster Daryl Hannah stole the show from the other veteran Thespians with her portrayal of burned-out Maddy Pilager who just happened to be an expert archer. Mary Kay Place, an exceptional actress was virtually wasted in a small poorly written role. The rest of the cast was great as has been noted by others. Especially noteworthy were Kris Kristofferson, a much better actor and songwriter than he is a singer, the under-appreciated Chris Cooper, Ralph Waite, who never gives a poor performance, and Richard Dreyfuss, whose part was also underwritten.