Yesterday I treated myself to watching Silver City, the latest film by John Sayles.

If there is one thing to understand about a John Sayles’ film, it is that my god is there a lot going on. Sometimes it is extraordinarily difficult to figure out what the main plot is supposed to be through the weavings of all the countless sub-plots. Actually, it would probably be more accurate to say there is no main-plot: there’s just a sub-plot from which the trailer and movie description was taken. Look, did you ever see Robert Altman’s Short Cuts? Or Magnolia? Imagine those films. On crack.

Silver City is a political film with a political motivation. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Dickie Pilager comes across as a clone of our beloved President. But Dickie isn’t the bad-guy of the story, just a fellow that non-mainstream leftist journalist Mitch Paine describes as (paraphrasing) having “…not a corrupt bone in his body, the others say whatever they need to get elected, but he’s a true believer.”

During the filming of a political ad, Dickie inadvertently snags a corpse on his fishing line. Here, the Karl Rove character, Chuck Raven steps into play, handling everything smoothly so that the Colorado voting populace won’t associate the candidate with a corpse. Here’s where he makes his mistake: he hires Danny O’Brien to investigate three people (the sister, the nutty talk show host, and a disgraced safety engineer) whom he feel might have been responsible for dumping a corpse in the lake (or at the very least, would like to embaress the campaign).

Here of course, is the problem: for Raven, anyway. See, it turns out that Danny used to be a reporter. He got burned on a story, lost his job, lost his girl, and lost the fire for doing good. Nowadays he’s one of those “I’m just one person and I can’t make a difference in this crazy messed up world … so why bother?” But as he investigates the who and the why of the dead man, and the connection that key campaign supporters have to the Silver City project from which the movie gets its title, his fire comes a roarin’ back.

You’ve got the evil businessman, who when he looks upon open stretches of beautiful land sees condos and strip-malls; the politician father who hopes his son won’t humilitate both of them; the sheriff who wants an arrest, but knows enough to stay away from the crazy politicos. All in all, it makes for a great combination.

Story wise, Silver City is weaker than the last Sayles film I saw - Lone Star. It almost seems like Sayles was writing a murder mystery, and then decided to add an anti-Bush angle. While it works, you could plausibly cut Dickie and the entire campaign out of the film and wouldn’t miss much … except Dickie’s hilarious bit on the court-house steps when asked by a reporter, “What are some things that aren’t a priority?” His reply: “Well, when you’ve got things on the front burner, you’ve got to have things on the back burner. Like in a kitchen … it’s … like cooking!”

This is a film about politics, about the dangers of privatization, and the indentured servitude (or slavery) of Mexican immigrant workers, and a dose of environmentalism thrown in for good measure. It’s a film with an undertone of liberal thought - this is good, that is bad. Is it any surprise the bad guy has the last name “Pilager”? And at the end, Mother Nature likes to remind people of why she’s the Queen Bitch, and you fuck with her at your own peril.