For starters, it's a hard thing indeed to parody someone like Bush, whose every speaking appearance offers the potential for unintentional hilarity. Several of Pilager's lines are lifted verbatim from the President's own appearances, making the character even less of a caricature and more a blatant copy with the serial numbers barely filed off. Moreover, the history between Ferrer's character and Raven is taken directly from Karl Rove's college Republican shenanigans. It is to Sayles' credit that he doesn't focus too much on Pilager, but the ham-handed fashion in which the entire political campaign storyline is presented (names like "Pilager and "Raven" should give you a clue as to the level of subtlety involved) taints everything else in the film. The inclusion of the many redundant Pilager gaffes also means the principal actors have to present the larger plot in an annoyingly hurried fashion, and the didactic tone of the Pilager scenes distracts from the more thoughtful elements and the largely competent acting performances.

Although someone needs to make a sequel to The Phantom for Billy Zane before he ends up as this generation's Peter Lorre.

I still consider Sayles a fine filmmaker, even if his directing style can charitably be described as "minimalist." With Silver City, he's made the unfortunate mistake of casting aside the storyteller's role in favor of the polemicist's. Sayles obviously has strong feelings about the Bush Administration, but unlike the other topics he explores in Silver City (the plight of migrant laborers, corporate media monopolies, land management), he's unable to maintain an artistic aloofness, which just makes the Pilager scenes that much more shrill. The 2004 election will be over soon, for better or worse, and then hopefully John Sayles can go back to crafting thoughtful movies about multifaceted characters and can leave the political diatribes to someone else.