Posted: 12/09/2003

The Missing

(2003)

by D. Patrick Seitz

Ron Howard sends Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones into the wilderness in a blistering update of The Searchers.

With The Missing, director Ron Howard has managed to encapsulate a character-driven family piece within a paradoxically palatable shell of Western grit. It’s a touch longer than it needs to be, and there’s a slightly underdeveloped mysticism angle that gets introduced, but by and large, The Missing should be a satisfying few hours to anybody who appreciates Cate Blanchett and/or Tommy Lee Jones.

Maggie Gilkeson (Cate Blanchett) survives as a single mother in the untamed wilderness of New Mexico by means of her pragmatic, down-on-the-farm medical skills. Life is rough, but not without it’s occasional pleasantries. Her children accompany the farmhands on a trip into town for an expo, but they never return. The next morning, Maggie goes out to investigate. She discovers that her farmhands (one of whom was also her sometimes-lover) were ambushed by Indians en route to the expo, who kidnapped her older daughter, Lily (Evan Rachel Wood). Beset with local authorities who pay her problem little more than lip-service, Maggie has no choice to but turn to her estranged father, Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones), a white man who has “gone native” with the Apache, and who says he can track his granddaughter’s captors and probably buy her freedom. This goal is complicated by the presence of Chidin (Erik Schweig), an Indian witch-doctor whose huge frame, ravaged face and magical powers make him every guilty Caucasian’s worst nightmare. Chidin leads this party of Indians, who have kidnapped many girls, and who plan on selling them into white slavery as soon as they reach the Mexican border.

The Missing keeps audience tension high by presenting two probable outcomes to Maggie’s dilemma: either her rescue party won’t catch up to Chidin’s slavers and her daughter will be lost to her forever as a sex-slave in Mexico, or they’ll catch up to Chidin and he’ll massacre every last one of them. Oddly enough, though, Lily’s safety is paradoxically iron-clad. She is merchandise, and the degree of temporary protection that status confers upon her is mentioned more than once by her captors. They’ll make her eat sand, but they won’t rape or kill her. Chidin is a terrifying presence in The Missing, and he dispatches more than one victim for capricious reasons, but it does amp down the level of suspense a bit to know that the danger she’s in is more passive in nature than that which her rescuers are braving.

Cate Blanchett strikes just the right balance with her portrayal of Maggie Gilkeson, not sliding into either of the extremes that would have ruined the role. Taken at its basic elements, a single mother searching for her kidnapped daughter sounds like something Judith Light would star in for the Lifetime Channel. Blanchett’s Maggie could have all too easily come across like some ever-weepy Shelly Long knock-off from The Shining. Play it too much in the other direction, though, and you risk giving the audience an emotionless protagonist with whom they’ll be utterly unable to empathize. She employs the “less is more” approach in such a way that you know there’s more of it underneath the surface. You don’t need to see it so long as you feel sure of its existence. She has one scene where she silently smoothes out a blanket, for example, that had me tearing up.

Tommy Lee Jones’s portrayal of Samuel Jones is consistent with his other work…in other words, he makes it so easy that you almost feel like he’s cheating, and can’t be judged by the same criteria. One can only imagine how much practice it must take to deliver dialogue to effortlessly. To watch him, though, you’d just assume he was adlibbing everything he said, and not terribly concerned about sounding like a fool in the process. There’s a naturalism to his characters that you can’t quite put your finger on (as was the case in The Hunted, which his presence worked to redeem slightly), but that gets the job done. Samuel has it none too easy, as he finds himself tracking his granddaughter in an effort to try and find some degree of reconciliation with the daughter he abandoned years ago. With one granddaughter kidnapped, and the other granddaughter and daughter pursing the captives, Samuel’s entire family is on the line.

As is the case with any film of this genre, The Missing is sure to raise a few hackles with what might be misconstrued as Indian-bashing or racist stereotypes. It’s an accusation that can be made, but not one that can be borne up by the specifics of the film. Some of the most selfless acts in The Missing are undertaken by its Indian characters. Similarly, there are a few white men among the party of slavers. There’s enough bravery and villainy to transcend the traditional Western’s color line.

D. Patrick Seitz is a writer and actor working in Los Angeles.

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