Ron Howard has made a couple of dozen movies over his career to date, the most notable of which have been A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13. In the former, he almost (but not quite) let a fine script get bogged down due to undisciplined editing and unwarranted slips into sentimentality. The latter, with a sure-fire real-life story and the spectacle and drama of space travel, brought out the best of Howard’s directing skills.
The Missing offers neither the thoughtful content of A Beautiful Mind nor the spectacle of space travel, but it is a competent piece of popular filmmaking that should please the audiences at the megaplexes. It’s a western crossed with the horror/thriller genre, goosed up with minor excursions into the supernatural.
For a change, the hero is a woman, Maggie Gilkeson (Cate Blanchett), a rancher, a healer and a single mother of two young girls. When Maggie’s father, Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) reappears after a twenty year absence, seeking to reestablish family contact, Maggie rebuffs him, refusing even to feed him dinner. Jones had abandoned wife and family to live with the Apaches and has absorbedthe tribe’s culture, skills, and, particularly, their religious beliefs, as well.
Then Maggie’s foreman and lover is murdered and her older daughter kidnapped by Pesh-Chidin (Eric Schweig), an Apache with shamanic powers turned evil. He’s a slave trader, abducting desirable young women in the American Southwest and selling them across the border in Mexico. Desperate, Maggie turns to her father for assistance in tracking Pesh-Chidin’s gang down and recovering her daughter.
In its favor, The Missing is elegantly photographed (Salvatore Totino) with stunning New Mexico scenery as its backdrop. Performances throughout are intense and suggest more depth to the characterizations than the script actually provides. The story is clearly told (a Howard attribute) and its narrative momentum is well sustained.
That said, the elements of popular entertainment are in place. But there’s frustration in the failure of the script to delve further into issues it raises, but never really explores. There is a a meeting of two cultures in this part of the world at this moment in history–the European settlers and the native Americans. Jones has lived in both; Pesh-Chidin’s group of thugs includes whites as well as Apaches. And, to keep things balanced, there are a couple of honorable Apaches who join up with Jones when they, too become victims of the kidnappers. Things are oh-so-politically correct, but these interplays are all plot-driven and don’t go the next step, offering little insight into the implications of a historical collision of unlike peoples.
On the psychological level, there is just enough said to make it clear that Maggie’s daughters were fathered by two different men. The elder daughter was perhaps the product of a rape, or at least a traumatic situation. The younger was the product of a marriage, but the one-time husband isn’t around. More questions are left unanswered than issues are confronted about Maggie’s past, so she never becomes more complex than a determined woman with commitment problems. Blanchett is brilliant but she can’t be expected to create a three-dimensional character out of thin Southwestern air.
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