Silver City
I got in trouble with H. (formerly known as Minky) about John Sayles. On a weekend high-desert ramble with her and some friends, I made the point that Sayles' signal accomplishment as a filmmaker is the way communities figure in his movies.Romances, actioners and procedurals usually invest the audience into one or two main characters, and while there are certainly inspired ensemble pieces from time to time, even the best (Magnolia comes to mind) rarely go beyond establishing several compelling stories at once. And that's no mean feat in itself.
But in Sayles' work, the relationships among people have as great a part to play as the individuals themselves, and we are often invested in some sort of social system. It can be as small as three people on a desert island in Limbo, or it can be the small town in Matewan, or it can be the small town plus the two countries on either side of its border in Lone Star. But , pace Margaret Thatcher, there is such a thing as society. There is a forest of human trees in Sayles' work, and it can be seen.
The reason I got in trouble with H. was that she had made the exact same point in an earlier conversation with me, and then I blithely made it to my friends without giving her any credit. So without tipping a hat to either of us, I introduced the same point into the text of a resolution passed by the City Council earlier this week declaring it John Sayles Day in the City of Los Angeles. It may be the most quasi-official statement of film criticism in California.
The same night as the Council proclamation, I got to see Silver City. It had a certain didactic clunkiness feeling to it, but by the end I didn't mind at all. It doesn't threaten Matewan or Lone Star as my favorite Sayles, but it accomplished one thing extraordinarily well: it presented its politics complexly without being conspiratorial about them.
It's not at all hard to tell that Chris Cooper's Dickie Pilager is a W. stand-in, but rather than play to the crowd with some dopey W. schtick, Sayles only uses that as a point of departure. Pilager lines up with W. on much more than the dyslexicon. He is the prodigal son of a political dynasty. He has a rich business patron who has bailed him out of a bad business decision. And he has a talented advisor who made his bones playing hardball for a leadership position in the College Republicans.Those Bush parallels are well documented but rarely narrated. And after building a half-familiar Bush biography on top of a familiar Bush caricature, Sayles goes on to show how that kind of character functions in one kind of society—but here, it's a whole political economy, much broader than a single town or island. He shows how useful such a politician can be to Kris Kristofferson's Wise Use capitalist, or to David Clennon's small-bore developer. And how each of them has relationships with newspapers and labor contractors that tie up just about everything they need to mow down obstacles to profit before they crop up. So I disagree with David Edelstein's take in Slate:
I thought we'd long ago moved past the notion that W. is just a "user-friendly" boob and begun to look for larger and more labyrinthine explanations for the poison that now gushes through our political discourse and our culture.Sayles does a fine job showing how the boob gets steered through the labyrinth.
I'm also surprised at how reviewers have responded poorly to Danny Huston's shuffling, hesitant protagonist. I actually loved the way that Huston slows down the movie's pace. In the end, Huston walks away from the action; there is no third-act steeplechase set-piece in which the whole web of corruption unravels. Huston passes the ball and walks off into the sunset with (or at least near) the girl. In Matewan, Chris Cooper's union organizer wasn't able to win, but he was able to instill the fight in the next generation. In Silver City, no one can even do that much, and the lake is poisoned. This happens too.
Addendum: Sayles comments on community narratives and other things in the Onion AV Club. Link.
posted by Josh K-sky at
5:53 PM
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