SAYLES SKEWERS

Canfield, Kevin

Sayles Skewers By Kevin Canfield There's something exhilarating about a film that revels in its lack of subtlety. Demonstrating the sort of cinematic self-assurance that can only be summoned by a...

...And the same thing is happening with the EPA and a lot of these other agencies...
...You can t help but to overhear what they re saying, and then you start to think about it...
...Beyond Bush, Sayles has serious problems with the way elections are conducted in America and the lack of responsiveness in our system...
...Though Silver City is perhaps his most overtly political film, this is not new territory for Sayles...
...Always a fan of ensemble casts, he has lately favored sprawling narratives that touch on a host of his perennial concerns— most of which derive from his class-consciousness...
...I don't think that anything the Bush Administration is doing has been really good for democracy...
...First off, he finds evidence of unsavory ties between the Pilager campaign and a corporate heavy played by Kris Kristofferson...
...Pilager is a malleable stumblebum who's never met a sentence he can't mangle...
...And so is that politician an employee of the public or is he an employee of the people who financed him...
...Sayles, who just turned fifty-four, has worked on a bigger canvas as the years have passed...
...He's not especially articulate...
...A Pilager bumper sticker reads, "Vote Pilager: Honesty...
...Along the way, Sayles manages to grapple with environmental degradation, media consolidation, and corporate malfeasance...
...And he's got this take-no-prisoners campaign manager very much based on Karl Rove...
...Dickie Pilager, like George Bush, he's a neophyte candidate...
...I'm definitely partisan—I'm partisan for democracy," adds Sayles...
...Released with no fanfare in 1980, that film tells the story of a group of friends who ve reunited for a weekend in New Hampshire ten years after they were arrested on the way to a Washington protest...
...Silver City, which opened September 17, is ostensibly the story of Dickie Pilager (played by Academy Award-winner Chris Cooper), a gubernatorial hopeful whose rise to power is preordained by birthright and orchestrated by a Machiavellian adviser named Chuck Raven (fellow Oscar-winner Richard Dreyfuss...
...A lot of lip service is being paid to democracy but not a whole lot of action...
...Just who are the constituents of our politicians...
...In the years that followed, the director dealt sympathetically with labor unions (Matewan, released in '87), citizens caught in the middle of pitched battles over gentrification (City of Hope, '91), race and substance abuse (Passion Fish, '92), and small-town corruption in the shadow of the Mexican border (Lone Star, '96...
...Demonstrating the sort of cinematic self-assurance that can only be summoned by a director confident in both his craft and his politics, John Sayles's new picture hammers away at the Bush Administration with artful abandon...
...Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York...
...Silver Cityarrives at a time when a number of films—Fahrenheit 9/11, Bush's Brain, and Uncovered: The War on Iraq, among others—have raised questions about the Bush team...
...His father is a famous politician...
...His work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate.com, and other publications...
...The candidate himself doesn't fully grasp the implications of the regressive tax policies and harmful environmental deregulations he favors, but he knows what his financial backers want, and he's happy to oblige...
...He isn't bashful...
...We started only a year ago, and we made this very quickly, very specifically, to come out before the election," Sayles says...
...That's exactly the opposite of what that agency should be doing and who should be running that agency...
...When it takes a break from skewering Bush, Silver City spins a compelling detective story...
...Are they rank-and-file voters, or are they these large corporations that do an awful lot of the campaign financing to the point where we literally have lobbyists writing regulations...
...This storyline, of course, bears more than a passing resemblance to the biography of the current occupant of the White House—a fact that Sayles does not flee from...
...For the head ofthe agency that's in charge ofworker safety, he appointed somebody who went around trying to prove in court that there's no such thing as repetitive stress injury...
...Allardyce is a good reporter, but her work threatens to be compromised by the financial transactions of her newspaper's parent company...
...he asks...
...Figure you re at a restaurant, and there s something you don t know about or haven t thought much about when a big argument breaks out at the next table...
...Sayles points out how Bush has sabotaged the regulatory apparatus...
...Though the film's resolution is open-ended, progressive moviegoers will get a chuckle at the comeuppance dealt the Pilager/Bush character...
...Articula-cy...
...At once idealistic about the role and responsibilities of democracy s citizens and skeptical of the qualifications and motivations of society's rule-makers, the picture announced Sayles's worldview...
...That s the way they'll be influential...
...To be sure, this is not a flattering fictionalization of Bush...
...Then O'Brien lands in the midst of an unexpected reunion with former girlfriend Nora Allardyce (Maria Bello...
...Danny O'Brien (played by Danny Huston, the son of famed director John Huston) is a reporter-turned-private-investigator confronted with a host of troubles...
...Says Sayles: "I feel like the basic two classes are the ruling class—and you just follow the money to figure out who they are— and everybody else...
...In many ways it feels like a bookend to his directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus Seven...
...Sayles says he does not think a single film could be the deciding factor in ejecting Bush from the White House...
...But," he said, "these films are part of the cultural conversation...
...The people who actually do vote are pretty secondary if they re even considered at all...
...He's got a huge amount of money behind him...
...Integrity...
...He's very much based on George Bush when he was running for governor of Texas the first time," says Sayles, the acclaimed director of Eight Men Out, Lone Star, and many other films...
...We thought it was important to get it out, to get people thinking about these things and consider what's going on in the country...
...The son of teachers, he grew up in the old factory town of Schenectady, New York, and describes himself as "a class warrior...
...He's not especially cut out for the public part of the job...

Vol. 68 • November 2004 • No. 11


 
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