The greatest movie ever!

An action-packed slog

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

This is one of those films that get made because a rich Hollywood liberal wants to yell at the rest of the country for not believing what the rich Hollywood liberal believes. Apparently, writing a letter to the editor just isn't good enough for them. N o, they have to waste huge amounts of money and a lot of people's time making shoddy pieces of propaganda like Silver City. The only thing that anyone ever learns from these political movies is that rich Hollywood liberals have their heads firmly placed in an anatomically impossible position.Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper) is the vacant son of a politically powerful family in Colorado. Dickie is running for governor and is leading in the polls, but then a dead body turns up while he's filming a campaign commercial. Dickie's Machiavellian campaign manager (Richard Dreyfuss) hires a private eye named Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston) in response. Not to investigate the sudden appearance of a corpse, but simply as a messenger to certain enemies of the Pilager campaign. Danny's simply supposed to let these enemies - a right-wing talk show host, a former mine safety inspector and Dickie's embarrassing sister - know that they're being watched. Danny, however, used to be an investigative reporter and decides to find out where the dead man came from and how he ended up dead. That leads him on a circuitous route through the worlds of real estate, illegal immigration, political dynasties, corporate influence peddling, environmentalism and old girlfriends until Danny discovers the truth and the audience discovers that writer/director John Sayles really didn't think this story through.Silver City has to be one of the worst written movies ever made by a professional filmmaker. This thing is jammed to the gills with almost every sort of lazy, boring, cheap and hackneyed scripting that would get you an "F" in any decent screen writing class. To start with, Sayles takes the maxim of "show, don't tell" and shoots it out of a cannon into a pit of ravenous badgers. Most of the movie is nothing but one character after another telling us stuff and telling us stuff and telling us stuff. It's like someone filmed the live performance of a Ken Burns documentary, except none of the subject matter is interesting and none of the dialog is well phrased. When people in this film talk to each other, they're not really talking to each other. They're making speeches that Sayles thinks the audience needs to hear. None of the characters have any depth. The bad guys are cartoonishly bad and the good guys are cartoonishly good. Poor Maria Bello plays a role so skimpy and clichéd that her name in the script should have literally been Token Girlfriend. Then there's the fact that a third of the time Sayles seems to be writing a toothless political satire, a third of the time he seems to be writing a lame homage to Chinatown and the rest of the time he seems to be writing an afterschool special on the horrors of illegal immigration.The acting is…well, the script these performers have to work with is so awful it's hard to tell if they're doing a good job or not. For example, Danny Huston is either giving a terrible performance or he's giving a really good performance of a horribly-conceived character. I think Danny O'Brien is supposed to be a beaten down man who covers up the fact that he still really cares about things by acting like a cynical and irreverent smart ass. When we see flashes of the real O'Brien, Huston makes those moments genuine and affecting, but 95 percent of the time we only see the smart ass facade and Huston does it in a very fake and forced manner such that I can't tell if it's poor acting or if that's the affect he's going for. Huston may be deliberately doing the smart ass thing in a phony way because it is just an act that O'Brien puts on for the rest of the world but since that act is about all we ever see of O'Brien, it's impossible to tell.Chris Cooper does do an outstanding job playing Dickie Pilager as an amalgamation of everything liberals hated about George W. Bush in 2004. He could have been savagely hilarious in a black comedy about the Bush Administration, but in this film it's like Cooper is doing a one-man show with no punch line. Richard Dreyfuss also appears to be having fun as the amoral campaign manager, yet it's as though Sayles got distracted by a shiny object and forgot these two guys were actually in his movie.There are a lot of bad filmmakers out there, people with little talent and no clue who make movies you wouldn't show to the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Even those folks would be hard pressed to make anything as iniquitous as Silver City. When you've got to crack open the thesaurus to find a new term of disparagement for a movie, you know it's got to suck hard.

This story starts off in a beautiful scene in Colorado and a new local politician named Chris Pilager, (Chris Cooper) who is suppose to be fishing and he pulls in a corpse. It is from this point on that the story starts to unfold with Chuck Raven, (Richard Dreyfuss) political manager for Pilager starts hiring a former journalist and private detective to investigate this person found in the water. This detective is a guy named Danny O'Brien, (Danny Huston) who gets himself all tangled up in a political jungle that puts him in grave danger. However, Danny does meet up with the sister of Chris Pilager, (Daryl Hannah) and they have a romantic scene in bed and then they start fighting. This is definitely a great film to view and also enjoy the great acting of Dreyfuss and Hannah. Enjoy.

A nice try at educating the public that doesn't quite come off. The thing is like a bolt of lightning with its leader stroke zigzagging all over the place, unable to find earth, until it finally peters out.The many subplots, which other commenter have mentioned, don't bother me so much as the fact that they don't really seem connected to one another. There's a good deal of time spent on undocumented workers that has nothing to do with the main thrust of the movie, which has to do with a planned community to be built on contaminated land. Romances that are clipped and cartoonish.Some very good performers are involved in these goings on. Some, like Danny Huston, upon whom the plot more or less hinges, don't bring too much to the party. He looks a little like Kiefer Southerland and sounds like a disk jockey and has a Hollywood haircut. None of this is his fault, but it has to be admitted that it all lessens our interest in the story. He doesn't come across as the role he's been given. He doesn't come across as an actor playing the role either. He comes across as a simulacrum of an actor playing the role.The other actors for the most part live up to their potential. Dreyfus isn't on coke anymore, I know, but he plays the political adviser as if he were. Billy Zane is good, as always, as a fishy phony balding smiling sleaze bag. Darryl Hannah is coarser, more mature, and scrumptious. She's even cute when she's mad. Kris Kristofferson is his reliable self. Miguel Ferrer is an angry, husky, shouting, scowling right-wing media person.The standout performance is by Chris Cooper at the soon-to-be-governor Pilage. Sure, the script and the performance poke fun at George W. Bush.Here's Pilage at a Q and A session. Reporter: "So you are in favor of a mandatory death penalty?" Pilage: "Let me put it this way. We have to say to the wrongdoers that there is no place here for them. Get out. You do the crime -- you have to face your lumps." Here's GWB a few years ago. "There's an old saying in Texas. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice (puzzled pause) -- you can't get away with it." But that's nothing to squawk about. I don't know that it's any worse than the number that Travolta and Nichols did on Clinton in "Primary Colors." And anyway, we don't ask our presidents to be especially elegant in their speech, just literate enough to read. Look at Eisenhower.On top of that, Cooper doesn't simply take aim at Bush. Cooper's presidential candidate may stumble over the English language, but he's not a self-confident, strutting caricature either. He brings an understated touch of pathos to the role. He's out riding with Kristofferson's millionaire and Kristofferson waves at the majestic mountains around them and says, "People miss the big picture. You know what the big picture is?" And Cooper, bemused, at a loss, looks uncomfortably at the ground and stutters a bit before Kristofferson enlightens him -- "Private enterprise." Cooper's politician is not a man who has grown too big for his britches, just a guy who's getting in over his head and, at some level or other, realizes it.There are some good non-didactic lines in the film too. A matter-of-fact sheriff shoots a Mexican villain who is holding a gun on Huston, then wanders over to the dead body, rolls it face up, and remarks, "He has that wanted-for-questioning shot-while-resisting-arrest look about him." And I can't help but disagree with comments that argue we don't need the lesson proffered by this movie to be drilled into us. Maybe those who argue this can see "the big picture," but as a collectivity we seem to have been particularly lax in paying attention to the social problems the movie deals with. We are, as I write this, in the process of selling off our national forests to private interests and leasing to the timber industry thousands of acres that belong to us. Many of our leaders are fighting with all their resources to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, which may add two percent to our domestic oil supply beginning eight to ten years from now. And there is hardly a peep out of us.Anthropologists have delineated three possible kinds of relationships to the natural environment. (1) We can be subjugated to it, as most human beings who have ever lived have been. (2) We can live in harmony with it, treating it as a trust fund or stewardship for future generations. Or (3) we can attempt to conquer it and exploit it regardless of consequences, some of which are unforeseeable. The choice is a monumental one and deserves attention, even in an obvious polemic like this movie.

This movie was horrible and the only reason it was even made was because the story appealed to the far-left. I consider my self a moderate, so I was able to see this film as the pile of garbage it was. While I'm not a Bush fan, your dislike for GW is not enough of a reason to see this movie.To start, the movie was shot on such low-grade film that it comes off as cheap, rather then artsy. Additionally, the characters are seriously lacking in depth. Chris Cooper's character was a poor parody of George Bush; better suited for Saturday Night Live then a Dramatic film. The rest of the characters are walking clichés and are poor facsimiles of other characters from much better movies.Avoid this movie at all costs!