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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
John Sayles on the campaign trail in "Silver City"; "Reconstruction" is a delightful Copenhagen confection; talking to Werner Herzog about "Incident at Loch Ness."
Sep 17, 2004 | OK, so there's a new John Sayles movie, and what is left to say about that at this point? You pretty much know already whether you're going to like it or not. As one friend of mine puts it, John Sayles is the favorite movie director of people who don't go to the movies. And you know what? That's a niche, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. Sayles is the prime example of how to write your own ticket in American independent film: He writes scripts for Hollywood flicks when he needs to make money, and has developed the autonomy to make his low-budget prestige films, one after the other, with no corporate interference.
Then there are his movies in themselves, which are the prime example of an entire career spent preaching to the choir. Sayles has basically been making the same picture for, like, umpty-five years now. I've gotten used to it; I even kind of like it. It's a picture in which some fine and well-intentioned actors stand in front of a scenic background, knees locked, and deliver a monologue about America. Sometimes it's a pretty good monologue about America. And once you get used to the movie's creaking plot, its aw-shucks ragtag heroes and sniggering, black-hatted villains, and once the general boringness of the filmmaking stops bothering you, the Sayles film can crank itself up to a certain power.
That's certainly the case with Sayles' new "Silver City," which has gotten a lot of attention for Chris Cooper's performance as a tongue-tied, pampered boob who's running for governor of Colorado as the handpicked candidate of his United States senator dad (Michael Murphy) and a sinister, string-pulling tycoon (Kris Kristofferson). Sayles and Cooper presumably have George W. Bush in mind with the mangled syntax and generally addled demeanor of Dickie Pilager (Sayles has never been too subtle with character names, which I guess is in the Dickensian tradition). But to my mind the satire doesn't go far enough. Pilager remains nothing more than a cipher, an awkward kid wearing a grown-up's mask, while people who meet Bush generally report he's a relaxed and genial presence. Wouldn't it have been more interesting to make the vacant vessel of evil a genuinely nice guy?
Sayles has made some films I basically enjoyed (like "Lone Star" and "Eight Men Out") along with others I found tedious ("Passion Fish," "City of Hope") and a lot that are basically agreeable time-wasters. You can count on him for a few things: a tender touch with lost romance, an unforced sympathy for the underdog and a couple of good punches to the gut. Complication and ambiguity, though -- he doesn't really do those. I think it frustrates a lot of film critics that a significant audience of smart, literate, left-leaning moviegoers evidently prefers Sayles' didactic, ax-to-the-head melodramas to subtler and more artful filmmaking. But guess what? Americans by and large go to the movies to feel, not to think, and that isn't contingent on whether they listen to Rush or Nina Totenberg.
Except for its election-year topicality and Cooper's odd, strangled performance, "Silver City" is a pretty standard Sayles-ian drama of middle American greed and corruption. Its quasi-hapless hero is a disgraced journalist turned private investigator named Danny O'Brien, played by Danny Huston as a stammering, likable innocent who can't keep in his head the lesson that no good deed goes unpunished. Sayles has a way of thrusting unlikely actors into starring roles -- whether it's Joe Morton in "Brother From Another Planet" or Mary McDonnell in "Passion Fish" -- that you can't help but admire, and if Huston isn't likely to take Hollywood by storm, this is an irresistibly awkward performance.
