SILVER CITY begins with "Hail to the Chief"-backed opening credits, then a legend across the screen, "Richard Pilager cares about Colorado." Called "Dicky" by his pals, the conservative political candidate (
Chris Cooper) is filming an ad with a script that has him saying, "I've always turned to nature to sort things out in my mind, make sense of the world." But filming stops when Dicky's fishing line snags a dead body. Pilager's campaign manager Chuck (
Richard Dreyfuss) hires investigator Danny O'Brien (Danny Houston) to see if one of Pilager's three most likely enemies had something to do with the body. Danny's investigation takes him to a mine safety expert whose career was destroyed by Pilager (Ralph Waite), illegal immigrant workers, left-wing reporters who keep databases of the web of connections between politicians and wealthy executives, and Pilager's bitter and angry sister, a woman who is overly fond of marijuana and archery, and Danny's own ex-girlfriend (
Maria Bello), a reporter now engaged to a lobbyist.