Considering that Silver City is a film that advertises itself as a Bush-bashing story, and considering the fact that I lean pretty hard right, one might come to a quick conclusion about my overall assessment of the film. The ironic reality is that the parts that make fun of President Bush comprise the ONLY thing that keeps this thing from getting a one. Chris Cooper is a riot as a Colorado state senator who reproduces George Bush in speech and gesture. It’s far funnier than anything SNL has ever done.

When Cooper’s not on the screen, however – which is most of the time – the film falls completely flat. Here’s my theory on how this thing ever got into production in the first place. Someone – in this case director John Sayles – wrote a crappy murder mystery script that wouldn’t even survive as a B-movie in the eighties. This terrible script would never have gotten anywhere, except that one of the sideline characters happens to be a pro-business, anti-environment state senator. So Sayles decides to make this movie and have the actor playing the senator imitate the mannerisms of George Bush and label the movie a “political satire”.

There is no political satire in Silver City. In fact, there are no real politics of any kind in Silver City. Other than Cooper’s imitation of Bush, there is nothing in the film that relates to anything in reality. There is absolutely nothing here but a crappy, low-budget murder mystery.

Though Cooper gets all the attention for the movie, the lead actor is actually a guy named Danny Huston. The plot runs around a swarm of unnecessary and incomprehensible story-lines, but the basic idea is pretty simple. One day, as Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper) is making a commercial for his campaign, a dead body comes up in the river behind him. Dickie’s campaign manager, Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss), thinks that the other party has planted the body and hires Danny O’Brien (Danny Huston) to investigate the murder.

Danny runs around, picking up clues in weird places, such as Dickie’s psychotic sister (Daryl Hannah), and a Mexican guy whose name I can’t remember. The dead body turns out to be a Mexican illegal alien working on a cattle ranch. This cattle ranch has some sort of complicated relationship to the Pilager’s, and I think there’s supposed to be some implication that the death of this Mexican guy occurred because people were more concerned about making money than they were about the environment or something. The script is so extremely convoluted that there’s really no message passed on through any of it. Not to mention the fact that it’s utterly boring from beginning to end.

To the degree that it was about Bush – I was hoping for a sort of republican Primary Colors. It never comes close. To the short extent that it actually tries to say something political, it’s so extremely one sided that it’s never even close to credible. Primary Colors created a complex, interesting character in Jack Stanton. Dickie Pilager, as a character, is as flat and dull as this entire movie.

Year: