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Silver City is Sayles' fifteenth film as writer-director-editor, and his ambition energizes every frame. The Dubya figure, played by Adaptation Oscar winner Chris Cooper, gets a joke name that sums up Sayles' attitude toward Bush's environmental policies: Dickie Pilager. Dickie isn't president -- yet. And he's not from Texas. The genial dork is running for governor of Colorado, where his senator daddy, Jud Pilager (Michael Murphy), has long called the shots. And will again if Jud and his corporate, media-spinning cronies wedge dumb Dickie into office.
Cooper has a ball with the role, fracturing Dickie's syntax in Dubya fashion and catching that lost look when a thought stalls in his skull. Sayles sees Dickie, and by extension George W., as an empty suit whose strings are pulled by greedy puppeteers. This may be true, but it limits Cooper's performance and the movie as a whole. http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/_/id/6475770?rnd=1095471063690&afl=imdb&pageid=rs.ReviewsMovieArchive&has-player=true&pageregion=mainRegion&version=6.0.11.847&John Sayles has always made political films; they are his bread-and-butter. Yet none, not even Matewan or City of Hope, has been more openly partisan than Silver City, which rips into the anti-environmental policies of the current administration, shows the pointlessness of fighting the co-op of big business and bigger government, and presents a scathing caricature of our current president in the person of Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper), the man who would be governor of Colorado. Pilager is all smiles and charm, yet, beneath the polished surface, there's nothing. Yet, because Sayles has a story to tell, and his tale is both compelling and alarming, Silver City is unlike Fahrenheit 9/11. This is a movie, not propaganda, and, while it doesn't shy away from displaying its political stripes, it is not a tract, nor is its goal to influence the 2004 election. Sayles is simply presenting today's circumstances as he sees them.
Silver City takes us into the 2004 Colorado gubernatorial race. The odds-on favorite to win is Dickie Pilager (not the most subtle last name for an anti-environmentalist), the son of popular Senator Judd Pilager (Michael Murphy). Dickie looks the part, and, as long as he sticks to the text of a prepared speech, he sounds like he knows what he's talking about, even if he does promise something for everyone. But if circumstances force him to talk extemporaneously, he becomes a stammering, incoherent idiot. "Don't ever let yourself get caught out in the open like that again," cautions his campaign manager, Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss), after one such incident. http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies/s/silver_city.htmlThanks to the FOX News channel, you probably know that Silver City casts Chris Cooper as a Dubya-like buffoon running for Colorado’s gubernatorial spot, but if you’re familiar with John Sayles’s work, then you know not to expect a rah-rah Fahrenheit 9/11-styled polemic. Essentially an Indiewood version of Jonathan Demme’s terrific The Manchurian Candidate, Silver City is about a prefab political puppet and the Haliburton-like corporation that pulls his strings. When Cooper’s half-wit reels in more than a fish while filming an innocuous political ad, his campaign manager, Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss), enlists a local firm to figure out who may be gunning for the guy...
...Billy Zane’s Big Tobacco proponent works for a Cheney-like goon played by Kris Kristofersson, who may cost Maria Bello’s gung-ho reporter her job when his all-powerful Bentine corporation buys the newspaper she works for. http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=1181Cooper's Pilager is so obviously Bush, in fact, that had I closed my eyes, I would have been taken immediately to one of those surreal press conferences that I so enjoy. Without a script, Bush is the most incompetent speaker in American political history, but that we already know. Cooper does more than a cheap imitation, however, as he captures the befuddled wonder of candidate Bush, as well as the iron-willed certainty of the president. http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/movies/s/silvercity.htmlEager to get on the Dubya-bash bandwagon, Sayles gives us a Colorado candidate for Governor with the none-too-subtle name of Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper). Like our current President, Dickie is at less than a loss when it comes to speaking off-the-cuff and is described as “a draft dodger, mama’s boy and a dimwit.” He also has a powerful Senator father (Michael Murphy), a Karl Rove-like handler named Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss) and a number of outsiders who would like nothing more than to knock him off his perch...
... Sayles certainly has his own stake as a concerned citizen in this backroom deal economy. Check out the spots he’s directed for MoveOn.org if you doubt it and his unease is certainly worth exploring. It’s disturbing that a politician’s personal friend like CEO Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofferson) can bail them out of anything for a favor to be named later or buy up a news outlet so they may report his slanted views. Only in our America can lobbyists turn tobacco companies into the underdog. Is that because the media has stopped reporting it or because we’ve stopped being interested in the little guy? http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10364&reviewer=198 |
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