A columnist for another newspaper has described John Sayles’s “Silver City” as “a Bush-bashing work that is more than Bush-bashing.” Yes, it’s also brain-bashing.

Like all of Mr. Sayles’s movies, that is, it has a message – a message to which all the events and characters obviously owe their existence and of which they are mere illustrations. This message is used as a blunt instrument with which the director belabors his audience from beginning to end.

It is not a pleasant experience. I have had this feeling of disgust before on coming out of Mr. Sayles’s movies, but there has usually also been a sense that the author is someone who might be capable of making a good movie. No more. I shall never again go to see a John Sayles movie willingly.

One consequence of making the movie back-to-front – that is, message first, plot and characters afterwards – is that one feels so hectored and bullied and preached at that it would be impossible to care about the characters even if they were better drawn.

When, after almost two hours, it looked as if the hero, played by Danny Huston (son of John) were in a situation of mortal peril, I found myself desperately hoping that he wouldn’t pull through. This had nothing to do with his left-wing politics; only that I was sick of him and the whole intrigue which he was supposedly investigating.

In a good movie, an investigation would naturally leave you in some doubt as to its outcome. This one does not. It is too obviously made up by Mr. Sayles only to be investigated – and to lead to entirely predictable conclusions. Altogether, the film’s moral and political schematic is way, way too familiar.

Let me put it to you this way. On one side the movie presents us with a property-developing tycoon (Kris Kristofferson), a right-wing senator (Michael Murphy), the senator’s idiot son (Chris Cooper), a candidate for governor, and the Karl Rove-like Machiavellian handler (Richard Dreyfuss) managing the son’s campaign.

On the other side there is Danny, an idealistic journalist looking into the death of an illegal immigrant worker; Danny’s beautiful ex-girlfriend and fellow idealistic journalist (Maria Bello); and, the most idealistic journalist of them all, the proprietor of a left-wing Web site (Tim Roth).

Where do you think the investigation will lead? Who do you think are the good guys and who the bad?

To give a further idea of how schematic it all is, I can also tell you that the senator and the foot-in-mouth gubernatorial candidate – obviously the designated-hittee standing in for a certain president who himself remains nameless – are named Pilager. Mr. Sayles, I should have mentioned, doesn’t do subtlety.

Nor does he do humor. Dickie Pi lager’s Bush-like rhetorical stumbles – “if you do the crime you are going to have to, um, take your lumps” or “Junior can’t read if he’s high on crack” (his reply to a reporter’s question about his own drug use) – just aren’t funny enough, though sometimes Mr. Sayles’s own earnest moralizing elicits an unintended laugh.

There is another Pilager, for instance, a sister played by Darryl Hannah. She is supposed to be embittered over the fact that her dad, the senator, didn’t allow her to have an abortion when she got pregnant as a teenager – because he had to pander to his right-wing supporters – and so ruined her career as an Olympic ice skater. The fiend! Will those pro-lifers stop at nothing?

At the same time, of course, she is a brave single mother to the fruit of her youthful passion – even though the child, now grown, is supposed to have been such a poor exchange for an Olympic medal that she no longer speaks to the rest of the family. Instead, she gets her revenge against them by sexual promiscuity and occasional and random threats of violence.

From one so determined to shock as she is it sounds odd, to say the least, to hear the lament: “One president is caught getting a b.j. in the Oval Office and the next rigs the election and gets away with it. We have lost the capacity to be shocked by anything anymore.”

Oh, come on! Try a little harder.

But like all the other actors, Ms. Hannah is just Mr. Sayles’s ventriloquist’s dummy, another chance for him to tell us what he thinks. Her character doesn’t need any plausibility of her own.

What Mr. Sayles, like so many others of the “progressive” minded, thinks is that the world is a Manichaean struggle between the forces of good, including all preservers of the environment, ex officio, and the forces of evil, including all developers and right-wing politicians.

This is just childish. Only the fact that the overwhelming majority of movie critics are also riders of Mr. Sayles’s various political hobbyhorses can be preventing them from saying so and dismissing him as a propagandist so boring he makes Michael Moore look interesting.

Someone should tell Mr. Sayles that if you want to be politically serious you have to start from the proposition that there is really something to disagree about – that there are men of good will on both sides. To treat those you disagree with as vicious and corrupt is just a form of mudslinging and hatred. And it can only produce cinematic junk.

If Mr. Sayles were a man of action, perhaps he would advocate civil war. But as he is only an intellectual he has nothing to offer but a peek at the private psychodrama of the self-righteous. God knows we’ve seen enough of that already this election season.