November 26, 2003 | For persuasive proof that, just like our mothers warned us, you really can have too much of a good thing, look no further than The Missing.
Ron Howard’s vividly gritty and brutally arresting Western is a powerfully effective piece of work, obviously inspired by John Ford’s The Searchers – John Wayne’s final line in that classic is echoed here by a major character – but well worth appreciating for its own considerable merits.
Trouble is, Howard tends to dawdle while taking his audience on a hard ride, and can’t resist the temptation to tack a fourth act onto what essentially is a three-act story. It’s easy to understand why he might want to linger so long with his vividly drawn and masterfully performed characters. But it’s just as easy to be uncomfortably aware of time passing and suspense diminishing in the final reel.
Adapted by screenwriter Ken Kaufman (Space Cowboys) from a novel by Thomas Eidson, the classically-structured scenario pivots on Maggie Gilkeson (Cate Blanchett), a resilient widow raising two young daughters while tending cattle and working as a “healer” (i.e., an unlicensed and obviously self-taught doctor) in 1885 New Mexico. One terrible day, Lilly (Evan Rachel Wood), Maggie’s teen-age daughter, is snatched by renegades who specialize in selling nubile girls into slavery south of the border. The local law enforcers offer no help, so Maggie must enlist the aid of her long-estranged father, Jones (an aptly cast Tommy Lee Jones), a grizzled stoic who recently – and conveniently – returned from decades of living with various Native American tribes.
Not surprisingly, the father-and-child reunion doesn’t begin as an all-is-forgiven love feast. Indeed, the very best scenes in The Missing are those that chart the grudgingly slow development of something like a wary truce between Maggie, who can’t forgive her father for inexplicably abandoning his family when she was a child, and Jones, who offers neither apologies or explanations because, truth be told, he can’t comprehend his own motives for leaving in the first place. There’s a terrific moment in which Jones explains why he bothered to return, but I won’t spoil it for you by even suggesting his reasoning or Maggie’s reaction. Suffice it to say that, here and elsewhere in The Missing, Jones and Blanchett generate a singularly potent chemistry while bringing out the best in each other.
Not unlike The Searchers, Howard’s film relies on a chief villain who’s rendered not so much as a flesh-and-blood character as a larger-than-life bogeyman. In this case, the baddie is Pesh-Chidin (Eric Schweig), a hulking, hideously scarred “brujo” (i.e., a spell-casting and trash-talking Apache warlock) who apparently decided to form a slave-trading gang only because it’s the most evil activity he can imagine. Howard attempts a shiver-inducing parallel between Pesh-Chidin’s witchcraft and Maggie’s “civilized” healing, and at one point suggests that the brujo has cast a spell on his pursuer. Unfortunately, these supernatural elements -– heavily exploited, it should be noted, in the movie’s trailers and TV spots -– are insufficiently integrated into the main story, and serve primarily as distracting widow dressing.
Jenna Boyd makes a strong impression in the rescue party as Dot, Maggie’s younger and feistier daughter, while key supporting roles are filled with such standouts as Aaron Eckhart (as Maggie’s doomed sweetheart) and Jay Tavare (as a vengeful Apache with his own reasons for hunting Pesh-Chiden). Cinematographer Salvatore Totino does yeoman work in creating and sustaining an atmosphere of dread and foreboding, and James Horner’s music enhances the chilly mood when it doesn’t sound like bits and pieces left over from the composer’s Titanic score.
