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.

"Silver City" is a John Sayles film from 2004 and stars Chris Cooper, Danny Huston, Maria Bello, Darryl Hannah, Richard Dreyfuss, and Mary Kay Place.

Chris Cooper plays village idiot Dicky Pillager, a member of a political family. He's been put up for governor because he's malleable. While filming an ad for his campaign, during which he's fishing, he hooks onto a dead body. A journalist, Chuck Raven (Dreyfuss) hires an investigator (Huston) to identify the body and learn whether or not he has any connection to the politician.

Set in Colorado, this is a pretty good movie that somehow failed to hold my interest. Others here complained about the end; I kind of liked the last half hour. Danny Huston is very good as the frustrated detective, and Darryl Hannah does a good job playing an eccentric.

Nothing too surprising in this film, it's the usual political corruption, the needs of the few are more important than the needs of the many kind of film, but it has some strong scenes and some good acting.

Several posters have seen fit to compare this outing to Chinatown and it's true there are similarities but given the sub-genre there are bound to be similarities with many movies not least, I would argue, Harper aka The Moving Target which had the benefit of a great screenwriter, Bill Goldman, on top of his game plus an equally great cast supporting Paul Newman's jaded private eye. I haven't seen too many Sayles movies but one I did see and loved was Eight Men Out and he seems to have an eye for if not obsession with the dubious moral choices available to movers and shakers in all walks of life. I agree with those reviews I have read here that he has 1) been a tad too ambitious and 2)started out to make one type of film and digressed into another but having said that the film kept me watching unlike the far more lauded Charlie And The Chocolate Factory which sent me to sleep (I saw them on successive days). The final image despite being a little obvious is nevertheless telling and the film is worth seeing if not remembering.