Danny Huston plays the central character, Richard Dreyfuss and Chris Cooper have substantial roles, but then we have Maria Bello, Tim Roth, Thora Birch, Kris Kristofferson, Miguel Ferrer, Billy Zane, Ralph Waite and Darryl Hannah in minor supporting roles. I suppose they all respect John Sayles as a director and support his environmental viewpoint. It all works as top-class ensemble playing.The let down is Huston. I ought to like him. He articulates well and never chews the scenery but is somehow too bland for a leading role. I think the evidence is that I had seen him in several movies before I noted his name, or became aware he was a member of the famous family.He was the weak link in "The Proposition", an otherwise very good film, in which he was supposed to be an intimidating, almost mythic figure like Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now". In "Fade to Black" he played Orson Welles so uninterestingly as to torpedo the movie.A less demanding role here, and I see the point that he is supposed to be a well-meaning and naive loser, but he seems too shallow as well, and that is never interesting. It takes a Sean Penn or a Robert Deniro to make a loser into compelling viewing, and harder still when outshone by top-drawer actors in supporting roles as here.This was my first Sayles film. I will next watch "Matawan", which most people think his best. While I totally identify with his ideology, and think that the subsequent years, and especially the race for GOP and Dem presidential nominations for 2016 (currently in progress as I write), show that the delineation of political corruption and buffoonery in the USA is not at all exaggerated, I do think his propaganda would be more effective if a little more subtle.Or is the US electorate so naive and ignorant that you have etch your message on an anvil and drop it on their heads to get your point across? To take just one example, the final scene. A few dead fish would have sufficed. The final frames were almost comic. And the rendering of "America the Beautiful" was just an embarrassment. Compare the end of "In the Valley of Elah", also by a notoriously "preachy" director. Haggis delivers the same message of "The USA is in trouble" far more effectively.

"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.

Possible Spoiler ahead: I had never heard of this film, but I was attracted by the ensemble cast of well known actors and was surprised to find it was a quite funny satire. It was also good to see the character actor James Gammon in a longer than usual part as the pragmatic Sheriff, in fact his talk with Danny at the end wrapped up all the loose ends, but not in the usual whodunit fashion - the Sheriff countered every solution with an alternative ending.I like films which do not have the traditional happy ending where the plot is solved and everyone lives happily ever after. Life is not like that. Life is ambiguous. Sometimes the wrong side wins, the bad guys don't get what is coming to them and the good guys lose out. It all depends on how you view it. One of Britain's morning newspapers had a headline the morning after the 2004 election "How could 34 million voters be so dumb?" Yes, that is all it took to re-elect G. W. Bush!

Honestly, one of the worst written, directed and acted movies I have ever seen. Seemed like a made-for-TV movie. And a bad one at that. I cannot believe that people are still hiring Danny Huston after seeing him in this movie, or that they are still allowing John Sayles to make films. My husband and I came across this movie on TV one night and got so bored with it, we ended up cleaning the house while it was on . . . and it still bored us! It made me think that critics have been so gullible with Sayles' previous films, such as Lone Star, which was raved about at he time but didn't really add up to much in the end. Spend your time on something better. Anything.