Powered by Google
Home
New This Week
Listings
8 days
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Art
Astrology
Books
Dance
Food
Hot links
Movies
Music
News + Features
Television
Theater
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Classifieds
Adult
Personals
Adult Personals
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Archives
Work for us
RSS
   

SILVER CITY

BY PETER KEOUGH

Take all the stylistic flash and paranoid mumbo-jumbo from Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate and what remains might look like John Sayles’s film. Maybe it needs a little more flash and mumbo-jumbo, or at least a stronger leading man. Danny Huston is no Jack Nicholson as the gumshoe hired to look into the circumstances surrounding the dead body that surfaces while Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dickie Pilager (the name is not Sayles’s least subtle touch) is shooting a campaign ad. As in Chinatown, the investigation leads to a lethal conspiracy at the highest levels of power and even involves a Faye Dunaway–esque loose-cannon love interest (Daryl Hannah as Pilager’s black-sheep sister). But this being a John Sayles movie, the ultimate goal is a politically correct checklist of liberal causes. Too bad: Silver City looks as if it might be another Lone Star, one of Sayles’s best movies, and instead turns out more like City of Hope, one of his worst. It’s well worth seeing, however, for Chris Cooper’s brilliant rendering of Pilager as a Rocky Mountain George W. and Richard Dreyfuss’s reptilian turn as his Dick Cheney/Karl Rove–like campaign manager. At the Showcase Seekonk Route 6. (129 minutes)


Issue Date: September 24 - 30, 2004
Back to the Movies table of contents








home | feedback | masthead | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy | work for us

 © 2000 - 2007 Phoenix Media Communications Group