Search and destroy
Cate Blanchett gets her gun for The Missing
In its treatment of Native Americans, Ron Howard’s The Missing marks the beginning of the post-Dances With Wolves period of Westerns. Early oaters barely distinguished between indigenous tribes, but considered them all faceless savages. Around the time of Little Big Man, Native Americans became faceless martyrs to expansionist America, and though they were still victims in Wolves, they emerged in three dimensions.
The Missing brings back the “savage Indian” with a vengeance and plays up some very old fears. Howard’s film strives for political correctness by including some good Native Americans to counteract the evil ones but muddies its own themes. The film works fine enough as a thriller with a Western backdrop, but its larger messages are either too simple or too confused.
Howard begins the film with tough, earthy moments that work against his image as a vanilla filmmaker. In the first scene, frontier doctor Maggie Gilkeson (Cate Blanchett) yanks out the last rotting tooth from an old woman’s mouth. Maggie also runs a remote, New Mexican ranch and is a single mother to her restless, teenage daughter Lilly (Evan Rachael Wood) and younger tomboy Dot (Jenna Boyd).
Maggie gives an uncharacteristically icy welcome to a stranger named Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) who, it turns out, is her estranged father. Blanchett proves effectively bitter and discomfited in her early scenes with Jones, but Ken Kaufman’s scripting is entirely conventional. The Missing could be any modern tale of a deadbeat dad angling for reconciliation.
It could also be a remake of The Searchers. A band of Apache outlaws kidnaps Lilly, so Maggie reluctantly accepts her father’s aid in tracking them. They bring Dot along too, and though their mission seems horribly dangerous for such a young girl, Boyd gives the character enough fortitude that we can accept her presence.
Westerns generally rely on cut-and-dried themes, particularly the tension between the wilderness and encroaching civilization. The Missing throws suspicion on the latter at every chance, as such “establishment” figures like a milquetoast sheriff (Clint Howard) and a self-serving cavalry officer (Val Kilmer) offer help in rescuing Lilly. Such technological trappings as phonographs and photography turn out to be lethal distractions on the frontier, and even Christianity isn’t reliable, as Maggie’s crucifix causes a rescue attempt to go wrong.
But in this film, Native American magic works. Lilly’s chief kidnapper (Eric Schweig) is a “brujo,” or witch, possessed of toxic powders and the ability to cast bona fide curses on his enemies. Kidnapping young women to sell in Mexico, the sadistic brujo looks literally like an ogre, with bad skin, crooked teeth and fingernails like black claws. Although the film points to the United States’ barbaric treatment of Native Americans, it doesn’t hesitate to demonize the brujo and his followers.
The Missing builds to some suspenseful moments in which spooked horses practically roar with fear. It also captures some ominous locations, such as color-bleached hills and narrow, twisted canyons prone to flash-flooding. But the quiet, dialogue-driven moments are edited at a television-style pace, and too often the action scenes fall back on cliches, like the gun just out of reach in a life-or-death struggle. No matter how many movies Howard directs or how many genres he dabbles in, he’s only a mediocre filmmaker, with the rare exceptions (Apollo 13 and a few early comedies) proving the rule.
But he’s undoubtedly gifted at putting together star vehicles, and he gets sharp, alert performances from his actors, especially Blanchett. She’s much better suited to Missing’s moments of shifty-eyed nervousness and fierce resolve than the one-note brashness of Veronica Guerin. Comfortably holding her rifle, she’s the embodiment of protective maternal instincts.
Blanchett doesn’t transcend the film’s conventional attitudes about family dynamics or feminine empowerment, but at least she makes them seem deeply felt. Yet The Missing encourages its audience to root for Maggie and her besieged white family to kill predatory Native Americans, and the film leaves an aftertaste like bad medicine.