From Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of Silver City:
Despite John Sayles's charm and good intentions as a writer-director, I started avoiding his movies around the time his Men With Guns was released in 1998. The closer his fictions came to reality, the more inadequate they seemed, with their conventional plots and familiar
characters. Iadmire the man's politics, but his films seem misguided, because every new problem has the same old tiresome solution. (A notable exception is his recent anti-Bush campaign ad, which he wrote as well as directed; it can be seen at <http://www.moveonpac.org/10weeks>.) Like so much of the American old left, he's an aesthetic reactionary who doesn't trust a plot or character he hasn't shaken hands with many times before.
The problem is worse than ever in Silver City, an election-year special that assaults George W. with the tried-and-true plot turns of a Raymond Chandler mystery. The movie's being proudly promoted for doing just that, which tells us we're not going to have our minds broadened or our beliefs challenged -- and that Bush has little cause for alarm. "In the tradition of the great film noirs, from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown," states the press book, "Danny's investigation inexorably pulls him deeper and deeper into a complex web of influence and corruption, here involving high stakes lobbyists, media conglomerates, environmental plunderers, and undocumented migrant workers." The old phrases pile up like henhouse sections. It clearly hasn't occurred to anyone to try to say something new about these issues; instead we're reassured that we're in known territory.
Even if the influence cited were of an environmentalist disciple of Chandler such as Ross Macdonald, the status quo wouldn't be threatened, because familiarity isn't the only thing wrong with these prefab notions. "Is there any way to win?" asks Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), archetypal doom-ridden noir heroine in Out of the Past (1947), addressing Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), archetypal doom-ridden noir hero. He replies, "There's a way to lose more slowly." When it comes to politics in art, the mannerist noir style seems to be one of the most attractive ways of losing slowly. It makes doom more voluptuous and artful than success, makes a film's characters seem "half in love with easeful Death," as Keats put it. I often wonder if the fondness many leftists have for noir films stems from their being suckers for romantic fatalism -- defeatists who wouldn't know what to do with success if it hit them over the head.
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<http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/2004/0904/091704_1.html>http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/2004/0904/091704_1.html