Like Michael Moore’s over-praised Bowling for Columbine and his current follow-up Fahrenheit 9/11, John Sayles’s wider sweep Silver City will hardly be judged by objective critical standards as film but will sink or swim according to a viewer’s stance on its issues.

One of our most admirably imaginative, independent-minded, independent filmmakers, Sayles commonly writes in good part for himself, and if he does not appear on-screen this time, his presence broods everywhere, as writer and editor as well as director. His sensitive works have dealt with marriage and lesbianism, racism, physical handicaps, cultural and economic marginalization, and corruption in labor, the media and politics, but in this disappointing newest offering his embrace is too large, and if the result is not twenty-four-karat rant, it still proves too heavy to float.

Political satire has been handled better in, say, Bulworth. Besides, the New Jersey-New York resident also attempts to cover a cornucopia of news manipulation, bullying trigger-happy cops, exploitation of undocumented migrant workers, right-wing radio, blindly zealous realtors, egotistical billionaires, evil conglomerates, water rights, arson and intimidation, environmental contamination, unfair labor practices, boosterism, lobbyists and the circus nature of electoral campaigns.

A complicated Chinatown-y pseudo-noir plot cannot reasonably contain so many angles and is further hampered by cardboard characterization and acting. Danny Huston resembles the bland good-guy Tom Hanks who has not attempted a dangerous rôle in years; Kris Kristofferson crosses Kenny Rogers with Willie Nelson; Chris Cooper imitates Jim Carrey paired with Harry Dunne; Richard Dreyfuss chews scenery like an out-of-hand Pacino; Billy Zane does Vin Diesel, while, Samurai sword exchanged for Olympic arrows, Daryl Hannah is Paris Hilton reprising Elle Driver; and the many Mexicans have less flavor than Brooklyn’s Eli Wallach.

Filmed fishing for a campaign spot, the less than bright, word-challenged born-again son of silver Senator Jud Pilager  (Michael Murphy), Colorado gubernatorial aspirant “Dim Dickie” Pilager (Cooper), hooks a decomposing body in pristine mountain Lake Arapaho. Outraged but anxious about possible causes and consequences, campaign manager Chuck Raven (Dreyfuss) hires one of the Grace Seymour (Mary Kay Place) See-More Detective Agency’s “investigators,” sad-sack Danny O’Brien.

Stunned by his live-in girlfriend Debbie’s not-unexpected leaving, accompanied by their microwave and best furniture, and still pining for former love Nora Allardyce (Maria Bello), O’Brien keeps up his habit of writing notes on the wallpaper for a better overview. A former liberal reporter who was fired along with his editor (Tim Roth) when his exposé articles were turned around by power and influence, he learns that the Hispanic body from the lake was laced with toxic cyanide, had chlorine in the lungs and a red-eyed scorpion tattooed on its hand. Interviewing those on Raven’s list of enemies, including Dickie’s sexy wayward sister Maddy (Hannah) and a disgraced EPA activist-turned-mine tour guide (Ralph Waite), O’Brien winds up getting an assistant and translator to enter the world of fearful, illegal immigrant laborers.

The path also goes through rough town sheriff Joe Skaggs (James Gammon), the local soft-spoken-big-stick cowboy millionaire and manipulator Wes Benteen (Kristofferson), and Nora herself, now a gung ho Defender reporter engaged to gun-for-hire lobbyist Chandler Tyson (Zane) but obviously still a soft touch for her true love, loser O’Brien.

The devious story line grows difficult to follow, a noir characteristic, but this scarcely matters, so pointed are the heavy-handed clues, unfunny the humor and, with a few variants, obvious the outcome. If, in warning, the battle but not the war is lost on the larger front, on the other, that of romance, victory is secured for the uninteresting couple, and, after all, tomorrow is another day. But Sayles’s career has set the bar high, and here his moral outrage gets the better of artistic sense, so he loses control of the material as film. That his political and social position will find favor with the chorus, cannot change the fact that Silver City is not among his more successful efforts.

(Released by Newmarket films and rated “R” for language.)