Movie Review: The Missing

The Missing

This move has been hyped from virtually every direction. It's Ron Howard's first Western! It's a scary movie! No, it's a mystery! It's got great actors like Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones in it! Wow! And to an extent, the hype is warranted. But to an even greater extent, it's not.

In The Missing, Cate Blanchett plays single mother of two, Maggie Gilkeson. Maggie, who is a doctor (or as close as you could get to one in the old west of 1885), raising two young girls on her own. Lily (Evan Rachel Wood) hates living on a ranch in the middle of New Mexico's nowhere, and dreams of running away to the big city. Dot (Jenna Boyd) is young enough to still take real delight in the wilderness and the farm animals the family raises. Although she's taken one of her farm hands as her secret lover (Brake Baldwin, played by Aaron Eckhart), Maggie seems largely content to remain single. Her comfortable routine is rudely interrupted, however, by the return of her father (Tommy Lee Jones), a man who ran off to live with the Indians when she was a young girl, and whom she's never forgiven for leaving the family. After giving him the medical care she admits is her "Christian duty," she chases her father off her land.

Life returns to normal for the Gilkesons only for the briefest of moments before a ruthless band of renegade Indians led by a powerful shaman called Pesh-Chidin (Eric Schweig) leaves murder and destruction in the wake of their abduction of young women in the region. One of those kidnapped is Lily, and Maggie vows she'll let nothing stop her from getting her daughter back. It is only that determination that enables her to swallow her pride and ask her estranged father for help. The local sheriff (played by Ron Howard's older brother, Clint Howard) refuses to help; the local Army post (led by an officer played by Val Kilmer, who appears ably here in a small role) is willing, but only after its cadre of captive Indians is delivered in chains to soldiers who wait in a direction opposite that the kidnappers appear to have taken. So Maggie and her father go after the kidnappers alone, knowing that they must find them and somehow win Maggie's daughter back before the group can reach the Mexican border and the captive women are sold to the highest bidder.

The Missing is brilliantly crafted. The cinemetography is gorgeous. The direction is subtle. The editing is well done. The sets are apparently quite authentic and perfectly reproduced. And the acting is superb (I was particularly impressed by the skills of the young Jenna Boyd who, working alongside two Oscar™ winners, held her own). But there was something missing in The Missing, at least for me. (It also didn't impress the friends I was with at the theatre, though both agreed with me that it was well done.) How many of you remember the award-winning Clint Eastwood film The Unforgiven? That was also a virtually flawless film, yet I didn't much care for it. I had precisely the same reaction to The Missing. It's very, very good, but it did absolutely nothing for me.

FAMILY SUITABILITY: The Missing is rated R. The plotline is intense, and some scenes of violence - or its aftermath - are quite graphic. I'd keep those under 15 away from this one. But for those fans of well-crafted Westerns, and for everyone who enjoys a look at the craft of filmmaking at its highest levels, The Missing has much to offer. Still, if you're not particularly keen on Westerns and you can't occupy yourself merely by studying camera angles and set decorations for two hours, you'd be better served miss The Missing.