Silver City (15)

In Silver City, however, Sayles is workmanlike in the worst way: his new film is like a sturdily-made wooden staircase that doesn't actually lead anywhere. Sayles sets out with honest intent to make a film that the American times call for, but perhaps the ironies of the second Bush era are too leaden, and its injustices too outrageous, to stir a fiction director to any but the most obvious insights.

Silver City is a satirical state-of-the-nation lament, framed in that dependable format, the Chandleresque detective story. Danny Huston plays Danny O'Brien, a disillusioned radical reporter-turned-private eye, who is assigned to investigate a corpse accidentally fished out of a Colorado lake by a clueless Republican senator, Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper), while shooting a campaign ad. No one cares much about the corpse, which happens to be Latino: all that concerns the senator's campaign manager (Richard Dreyfuss) is that hostile forces might have planted the stiff as a political ploy. But since, deep down, he's a Philip Marlowe-style tarnished white knight, O'Brien pursues the trail and uncovers the usual dark stew: a shady property deal, political and familial grudges, the exploitation of Mexican immigrants, and some highly lax industrial safety standards.

All this is standard material for Sayles: his plots often involve ecologically ruinous construction schemes, which invariably get their wordy exposition through press conferences, PR launch parties and a level-headed speech by some grizzled old-timer. You almost wish Sayles had thrown a curveball and revealed that the powerful Pilager family was in the pay of galactic emperor Zurg: it might even have been more revealing politically.

It's as if Sayles felt that his message about Bush-era politics was so important that to dress it up formally, or to provide too much visual interest, would distract us. Over-reliance on talk results in a film that feels like a verbose novel (Sayles does indeed have a sideline as a novelist) with illustrations: the film is drably shot by veteran radical Haskell Wexler. Kris Kristofferson, as a modern cattle baron of the "black hat" school, expounds his philosophy of speculators' rights to despoil the landscape, and Dreyfuss, all but twirling his moustache, translates the spin term "critical equilibrium" as "No handouts for the homeless". O'Brien's boss tells him, "The first rule is, don't go finding more than you're looking for," but this is so obviously the first rule of hard-boiled detective fiction that any shamus who needs to be told this shouldn't be in the business - and any film-maker who thinks we need to be told it shouldn't be working in the genre.

Just about every character represents a political position or a social type: O'Brien and his ex (Mario Bello) are lapsed idealistic hacks, Tim Roth and Thora Birch are internet muck-stirrers still burning the investigative flame, Billy Zane a smoothie lobbyist, a mercenary convinced he's defending the underdog even when working for the tobacco industry.

Charismatic as Danny Huston is, he's a little too amiable and patrician to embody a man on a mission. Only the cameos bring the film to life: notably, Miguel Ferrer's abrasive showing as a right wing-radio terrier, and Chris Cooper's inanely yabbering senator, a thinly-disguised Dubya who's perhaps too broadly drawn for this realistic context, but a star turn nonetheless. There's also an extraordinary sequence where Daryl Hannah appears as a longbow-toting Amazon, and immediately scuppers Sayles's dramatic economy by flooding the film with outsize glamour: hers are the only scenes that catch an authentically brassy tone of Chandleresque cynicism.

Perhaps Sayles feels that his argument needs to be laboured, that the electorate that voted in Bush twice needs to be hit over the head with it. But Silver City makes you realise how much more unnervingly the satirical spot was hit by the brazen, surreal glossiness of Jonathan Demme's recent The Manchurian Candidate. Perhaps Sayles's rage has defused his imagination; or perhaps, as seems to be the case, no American fiction film-maker is quite getting the measure of Bush's times. It's the documentarists who seem to be doing that, making films that are openly polemical and pamphleteering. That's fine and proper for documentaries: but when Silver City attempts that, the result looks a little shoddy, like slipping a political tract in a pulp paperback cover.

j.romney@independent.co.uk