We All Live in Silver City

I always like John Sayles' movies, so I tuned into "Silver City" this morning on Starz. This 2004 film got a lot of play in the Rockies since it was shot entirely in Colorado, and featured a fictional gubernatorial race by a guy who looked and spoke a lot like Pres. George W. Bush, who (in real life) was running for Prez. Chris Cooper plays Dickie Pilager, lamebrain son of Sen. Judson Pilager, with a distracted befuddlement, as if he's on the golf course, looking for his caddy. All the fat cats back Pilager, notably Wes Benteen, who owns most of Coolorado and covets the rest. He's played by one-time U.S. Army Green Beret and anti-war folk singer Kris Kristofferson. Richard Dreyfuss is Pilager's obsessed campaign manager, Chuck Raven. He's riding herd over the shooting of a campaign commercial when Pilager, posing as an avid outdoorsman, casts his fishing line into a lake and hooks a corpse. Raven is steamed, and thinks one of Pilager's enemies planted the body there to embarrass the candidate. He hires a private investigator to confront Pilager's three main enemies. The investigaor, a jaded former investigative reporter Danny O'Brien (played by Danny Huston) does just that and, along the way, discovers a huge scandal that can kill Pilager's campaign. It involves a mountain retirement community named Silver City to be built on a former mine site, owned by Benteen, that's riddled with toxic chemicals.

You have to watch it to find out what happens. Its ending owes more to the strategies of a good contemporary novel than to traditional filmmaking. Not surprising, since Sayles writes novels and short stories as well as his own movie scripts. Let's just say it's a great movie to watch during an election season when big corporations are very afraid that their Republican stranglehold on the U.S. government is being challenged. Democrats, too, have been suck-ups to corporate interests, but at least can serve as a counterweight to the current one-party system. Maybe we all don't have to live in Silver City.