E-Mail This Article to a Friend SILVER CITY

Take all the stylistic flash and paranoid mumbo-jumbo from Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate and what remains might look like John Sayles’s film. Maybe it needs a little more flash and mumbo-jumbo, or at least a stronger leading man. Danny Huston is no Jack Nicholson as the gumshoe hired to look into the circumstances surrounding the dead body that surfaces while Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dickie Pilager (the name is not Sayles’s least subtle touch) is shooting a campaign ad. As in Chinatown, the investigation leads to a lethal conspiracy at the highest levels of power and even involves a Faye Dunaway–esque loose-cannon love interest (Daryl Hannah as Pilager’s black-sheep sister). But this being a John Sayles movie, the ultimate goal is a politically correct checklist of liberal causes. Too bad: Silver City looks as if it might be another Lone Star, one of Sayles’s best movies, and instead turns out more like City of Hope, one of his worst. It’s well worth seeing, however, for Chris Cooper’s brilliant rendering of Pilager as a Rocky Mountain George W. and Richard Dreyfuss’s reptilian turn as his Dick Cheney/Karl Rove–like campaign manager. (129 minutes)