The Missing
When we first see Cate Blanchett in Ron Howard's new western thriller "The Missing," her character, Maggie Gilkeson, is sitting in an outhouse. She's just catching a few seconds' rest, but that location is an omen. In the 2 hours and 10 minutes to come, we will be treated to flayings, stabbings, bloody eyeballs, dead babies, torn flesh, and the sadistic brutalization of a group of captive young women. "Singin' in the Rain" it's not.
Well, who said life on the American frontier couldn't be staggeringly cruel? Revisionist westerns have for years been tearing down the old Hollywood store-front lies, and "The Missing" is just the latest movie to offer up unblinking violence as a kind of cauterizing historical truth. The movie is Howard's attempt at the artistically "pure" savagery of "Unforgiven," and that would be fine -- except that Howard isn't Clint Eastwood. He's Ron Howard, a flagrantly commercial filmmaker, and he's better at other things (a distinct point of view not being one of them). "The Missing" is well made, suspenseful, and superlatively acted for the most part, but its harshness never feels organic to the tale. What should be devastating is just terribly unpleasant.
Howard and screenwriter Ken Kaufman have essentially remade the 1956 John Ford classic "The Searchers" for an age of feminism and nontraditional families. (And for the age of neo-political incorrectness, too, but more on that later.) Maggie is a "healer" in 1885 New Mexico who gets a shock when her long-lost father shows up at her medical outpost one evening. Samuel (Tommy Lee Jones) abandoned his family decades before to "follow a hawk," an act for which his daughter has never forgiven him, and his years living among the Native Americans have turned him into a sorrowful mystic, not to mention a dead ringer for Willie Nelson.
As much as she wants nothing to do with him, the devoutly Christian Maggie has to rely on her father when a band of Chiricahua Apache and white renegades kill her lover (Aaron Eckhart) and kidnap her daughter Lilly (Evan Rachel Wood, transmuting her "Thirteen" hellion into an angry pioneer adolescent). The band heads toward Mexico to sell Lilly and other female captives into slavery; Samuel, Maggie, and younger daughter Dot (Jenna Boyd) give chase over insurmountable physical hardships.
Like "The Searchers," "The Missing" is episodic in nature, with each chapter meant to underscore the poverty and privations of the frontier. No one else cares about capturing the villains -- not the sheriff in town (Clint Howard, doing his obligatory fraternal cameo right down to the telegraph headset), not the US Army lieutenant (Val Kilmer) busy overseeing his looting soldiers. Maggie has to trust Samuel's shamanistic tracking abilities and desert smarts to get them through a harrowing flash flood and close to their quarry. Meanwhile, Lilly tries to escape, with grueling consequences. It's all about family, with the healer the one most in need of healing.
The movie runs into its deepest trouble with its depiction of Lilly's captors. After years of Hollywood wooden Indians and a more recent run of tribal angels (as in "Dances With Wolves"), movies like "The Last of the Mohicans" have acknowledged the historical truth that Native Americans could be as bloody-minded as their white conquerors. "The Missing" takes that freedom and runs back to the bad old days. The renegades are a degenerate bunch of creeps, and their leader, a brujo named Chidin, is played by hulking actor Eric Schweig as a grunting, unstoppable psycho -- Freddy Krueger in moccasins. Jay Tavare and Simon Baker are on hand briefly as a "good Indian" father and son, but their characters are barely fleshed out. In truth, the noblest savage here is Samuel, who embodies that old romantic cliche of the white man gone native and all the wiser for it.
I can imagine that a lot of people will be impressed with "The Missing" without exactly enjoying it. Jones does his usual flinty work, and both Blanchett and Wood disappear into their characters without a trace of actorly fussiness (I wish I could say the same for Boyd, who over-emotes annoyingly throughout). But Kaufman and Howard should have known better than to give Maggie the same final line of dialogue said by Ethan Edwards in "The Searchers." Coming out of John Wayne's mouth, those words signal forgiveness, conciliation, and the breaking of the character's racist fever. Coming from Blanchett, they only mean that she, and we, have survived an ordeal.
Video
