The Missing

[MacGuffin]

To make it's own thread instead of sharing Ron Howard's.

[Ghostboy]

My full review:

'The Missing' is Ron Howard's riff on the classic storyline epitomized by John Ford's 'The Searchers,' in which someone is lost and must be found. It is a western, but Howard directs it like a horror film; the wide plains of New Mexico are bleak and foreboding, and the natives, still referred to as injuns, are viewed by many as primal savages who ritualistically butcher their victims.

To be sure, the Old West, much romanticized, was surely a place of often overwhelming terror. I am currently reading Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian,' which is set at the same time and the same place, and I just finished a passage detailing an attack by Apache warriors that was as terrifiying as anything I've ever read or seen in a movie. It's certainly not politically correct, but it's (from what I've learned) true to the times and appropriate for the story. The same would go for 'The Missing,' if Howard could stick to his guns.

The running time of 'The Missing' is somewhere in the vicinity of two hours and twenty minutes, and some very material is contained therein. In the rest of this review, I will explain how addition editing could be done and a very good movie could be pulled from all the detritus that bogs the film down and makes it what it is, which is sort of a TV-movie with an A-list cast.

To begin with that cast: Cate Blanchett is the star of the piece. She plays Maggie, a doctor and single mother of two living in the hills of New Mexico. The thing about Blanchett is that she is so good at becoming whatever character she plays that a movie cannot benefit from having less or more of her as long as she's in it at all. Likewise with Tommy Lee Jones, who is not a chameleon like Blanchett but is called on here to do what he does best. His role, as Maggie's father, is somewhat derivative of his role in 'The Hunted,' which was in turn quite similar to his performance in 'The Fugitive.' He is an endearing stoic with a knack for finding people.

Between the two of them is an excellent conflict; Jones (his name in the movie) abandoned Maggie's family when he was a child to liv with a tribe of natives, and her resent towards him is strong. He reappears in her life right when she needs him the most, of course, after her elder daughter has been kidnapped. Their conflict is a familiar one, which is why it works, and why Howard (and, to be fair, screenwriter Ken Kaufman) should have realized that there was no need for them to spend time explaining their growing respect for each other. It's all there already; ten or twenty minutes of dialogue could have been conveyed in a glance.

Maggie's daughter Lily (Evan Rachel Wood, not quite given the chance to live up to her luminous work in 'Thirteen') has been kidnapped by a ragtag band of Apache spies who accost young women to sell into slavery in Mexico. Their leader is a brujo, a witch doctor with mystical powers who is also severely disfigured. Did Howard feel that a murderer who kidnaps girls was not scary enough? The mystical powers add nothing to the story, and the layers of makeup that actor Eric Schweig is buried under turn him into a lumbering monster who simply isn't very scary (it should be noted that Schweig is an excellent actor and is wasted almost entirely). The reason he's put on such a pedestal is because Howard doesn't want to offend anyone by making him human. With that mindset, he should have never made this movie in the first place.

He also felt compelled to include a few routine gunfights. I've already seen the second best Western gunfight I've ever seen this year, in 'Open Range,' and if you can't top 'em, why bother, especially when there are better things to be done? Like getting on with the meat of the story? This is a movie in which a damaged woman and her estranged father must hunt down a missing girl and deal with each other in the process; everything else -- the brujo, the magic, the friendly Indians who joke with Jones in their native languaug, and James Horner's score  -- could have been cut, and the movie could have been reduced to a lean, mean ninety minutes. This is a classic story that would benefit from a raw, brutal retelling. Howards maintains the brutality and a lot of that rawness, but he pads it down to the point that you don't notice it.

The one character who I wouldn't want to lose a second of is Maggie's youngest daughter, Dot; both the character and the actress display a moving amount of courage and resilience that belies their age. Whenever Dot is on screen, the horror and urgency of the circumstances get a jumpstart. Many of the early scenes in the film are shot from her point of view, and ow that I think about it, if Howard had maintained that perspective throughout the entire film, nearly every problem would have been solved. Leave it to the adults to micromanage something as elemental as the old west.

[modage]

i have free passes to this tonite, which would've probably been the only way i would ever see it, but i'm skipping it to get home for thanksgiving.  now i feel less bad about it.

i guess i was wrong. since my girlfriend was out of town i got bored and went to an INJUN DOUBLE FEATURE tonite with this and brother bear.  neither of which i really wanted to see, but both of which i though could maybe surprise me.  neither did.  i really need to go with my instincts more.  
i almost feel a little bad for this being ol' ronnie howards big follow up to his oscar house-cleaning Beautiful Mind.  you would expect there to be a much much larger ad campaign, but its like the studio is just trying to sweep it under the rug and get on with things.  i cant say i blame them, it wasnt bad.  it had some good moments.  good acting.  it was too long, and it wasnt really anything special though.  i agree with ghostboy, searchers plot sounded like good idea but just didnt make much of it.  i dont feel the need to ever see this again.