Danny Huston plays the central character, Richard Dreyfuss and Chris Cooper have substantial roles, but then we have Maria Bello, Tim Roth, Thora Birch, Kris Kristofferson, Miguel Ferrer, Billy Zane, Ralph Waite and Darryl Hannah in minor supporting roles. I suppose they all respect John Sayles as a director and support his environmental viewpoint. It all works as top-class ensemble playing.
The let down is Huston. I ought to like him. He articulates well and never chews the scenery but is somehow too bland for a leading role. I think the evidence is that I had seen him in several movies before I noted his name, or became aware he was a member of the famous family.
He was the weak link in "The Proposition", an otherwise very good film, in which he was supposed to be an intimidating, almost mythic figure like Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now". In "Fade to Black" he played Orson Welles so uninterestingly as to torpedo the movie.
A less demanding role here, and I see the point that he is supposed to be a well-meaning and naive loser, but he seems too shallow as well, and that is never interesting. It takes a Sean Penn or a Robert Deniro to make a loser into compelling viewing, and harder still when outshone by top-drawer actors in supporting roles as here.
This was my first Sayles film. I will next watch "Matawan", which most people think his best. While I totally identify with his ideology, and think that the subsequent years, and especially the race for GOP and Dem presidential nominations for 2016 (currently in progress as I write), show that the delineation of political corruption and buffoonery in the USA is not at all exaggerated, I do think his propaganda would be more effective if a little more subtle.
Or is the US electorate so naive and ignorant that you have etch your message on an anvil and drop it on their heads to get your point across? To take just one example, the final scene. A few dead fish would have sufficed. The final frames were almost comic. And the rendering of "America the Beautiful" was just an embarrassment. Compare the end of "In the Valley of Elah", also by a notoriously "preachy" director. Haggis delivers the same message of "The USA is in trouble" far more effectively.
The let down is Huston. I ought to like him. He articulates well and never chews the scenery but is somehow too bland for a leading role. I think the evidence is that I had seen him in several movies before I noted his name, or became aware he was a member of the famous family.
He was the weak link in "The Proposition", an otherwise very good film, in which he was supposed to be an intimidating, almost mythic figure like Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now". In "Fade to Black" he played Orson Welles so uninterestingly as to torpedo the movie.
A less demanding role here, and I see the point that he is supposed to be a well-meaning and naive loser, but he seems too shallow as well, and that is never interesting. It takes a Sean Penn or a Robert Deniro to make a loser into compelling viewing, and harder still when outshone by top-drawer actors in supporting roles as here.
This was my first Sayles film. I will next watch "Matawan", which most people think his best. While I totally identify with his ideology, and think that the subsequent years, and especially the race for GOP and Dem presidential nominations for 2016 (currently in progress as I write), show that the delineation of political corruption and buffoonery in the USA is not at all exaggerated, I do think his propaganda would be more effective if a little more subtle.
Or is the US electorate so naive and ignorant that you have etch your message on an anvil and drop it on their heads to get your point across? To take just one example, the final scene. A few dead fish would have sufficed. The final frames were almost comic. And the rendering of "America the Beautiful" was just an embarrassment. Compare the end of "In the Valley of Elah", also by a notoriously "preachy" director. Haggis delivers the same message of "The USA is in trouble" far more effectively.