Dir. Ron Howard, 2003, US, 130 mins
Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Cate Blanchett, Evan Rachel Wood, Jenna Boyd, Aaron Eckhart, Eric Schweig
Apologies that this review will begin with a comment on the trailer for The Missing that is currently gracing our cinema and television screens: it's probably the most misleading, poorly marketed trailer ever seen and bears no resemblance to the film itself.
This conflict is symptomatic of the identity crisis that holds The Missing back from being a better film. Set in New Mexico in 1885, it's the story of Maggie Gilkeson's (Blanchett) painful reconciliation with her father Samuel Jones (Jones), who left his family some twenty years before and has been roaming the country with an Apache tribe. Events are forced by the violent kidnap of Maggie's daughter Lilly (Wood) by some renegade Injuns, led by Chidin (a truly chilling Schweig), an evil Apache with psychic powers. Raiding homesteads and kidnapping ripe young girls, they are heading over the border to Mexico where they plan to sell them into the sex trade. Maggie sets off to the rescue with her younger daughter Dot in tow, and is forced to enlist her father's help in tracking the kidnappers. So begins an 'epic' adventure during which Maggie and Jones learn to overcome their painful past and get to know each other all over again. It's been marked as a modern-day twist on John Ford's classic The Searchers, but it can't seem to decide whether it's a western, a thriller or a drama and ends up languishing in a formulaic dirge between all three.
The Missing includes most of the key elements of a western: the setting, the community versus outsiders storyline, key characters such as the outsider and the 'law', chases on horseback. These are not obvious signatures like the traditional westerns of earlier times, but as films like Unforgiven proved the western isn't dead, it just needs an imaginative approach for a modern-day audience. Whereas that film dealt with a group of ageing heroes, settled down and scattered about the landscape, The Missing plunges us right back into the gung-ho world of frontier life while forcing us to accept several key changes, the most crucial being the role of a woman as the 'hero' (the attempt to make the victim/heroine - here Lily - more independent isn't new to this film). Maggie is a frontier-woman, bringing two children up in a desolate landscape and supporting them by working as a sort of lay doctor to the local community (but not Indians, of course). She has a beau in the form of Aaron Eckhart's Brake, but he's kept firmly at a distance and she refuses to marry him and relinquish her independence. It is fair to say that Blanchett does a great job and that her character is believable and admirable throughout.
A big problem is the diminished role of the landscape, key to so many westerns and rushed over here in favour of fast-paced action sequences. There are some beautiful shots from cinematographer Salvatore Totino, but it's not integral to the feel of the film so much as a background to the distractingly breathtaking chases and battles.
The thriller aspect of the film is truly frustrating. Never rising beyond the formulaic and predictable, it gulfs the genuinely fascinating relationships between the characters, which in turn never develop beyond the banal. The reconciliation between Maggie and her father is central to an appreciation of the film, and there are subtle links branching out from that to every other character, which are movingly set up but never followed through: Dot's fascination with her grandfather, for instance, or Lilly's personal journey from prissy teenager to a survivor in the mould of her mother.
Even the music reflects the tension in the film's aspirations. James Horner's score combines Celtic-style strains with drumming and tribal music, which resonates with the Native American world that 'invades' Maggie's precariously structured life and handily is great at setting up the suspense of a chase.
As the credits roll, the overall impression is one of puzzlement: was that film moving or slightly offensive? Was it overlong or too crammed with ideas and ambitions to fit into the 130-minute narrative? In the end, it's all of those things and none of them, and it's that which makes it so full of promise yet ultimately disappointing.
Kerry McLeod
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