IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
THE MISSING
Directed by Ron Howard
Rated R, 130 minutes
Toward the end of "The Missing", when Maggie (Cate Blanchett) has thawed enough toward her estranged father Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) to talk to him without icicles in her voice, she asks why it was that he abandoned his family all those years ago when she was a child, and went off to live with Indians.
Samuel responds with a story about an Indian who saw a hawk flying above his teepee and followed it, and didn't come home for years. When he finally returned and his wife asked him what happened, he said "That hawk just kept on flying."
By the time Samuel's hawk has done flying and he comes back to his family in 1886, his wife is long dead, and his grown daughter has enough hate stored up in her toward the old man to scorch the New Mexico Territory. Actually it's not clear that he means to be coming home even then. Maggie has become a healer, and Samuel has acquired some hardware in his body that needs removing.
She patches him up and sends him on his way with an earful of rage. But when her ranch foreman and lover Brake (Aaron Eckhart) is brutally killed and her older daughter Lily (Evan Rachel Wood of "Thirteen") kidnapped by a rogue gang of Apaches, Samuel returns and joins forces with the reluctant Maggie, using his Indian tracking skills to find them.
The movie is by Oscar-winning director Ron Howard ("A Beautiful Mind"), who nabbed a Golden Globe a quarter century ago as an actor in John Wayne's last picture, "The Shootist". "The Missing" calls to mind a couple of the Duke's other westerns. In "Big Jake" (1971), Wayne joins forces with his estranged wife (Maureen O'Hara) to rescue their kidnapped grandson. And of course the classic model is "The Searchers" (1956), but then, if you believe fans like Martin Scorsese, "The Searchers" is the model for pretty much every movie that's been made since.
Along with Maggie's plucky younger daughter Dot (Jenna Boyd), who refuses to be left behind with the neighbors ("I'll just follow you! You know I will!"), they set out across a New Mexico photographed in epic, awe-inspiring magnificence by cinematographer Salvatore Totino. Totino rediscovers the western landscape with the eye of an Albert Bierstadt, and Howard stitches the images together with James Horner's sonorous, menacing score.
Lily is in the clutches of a brujo, a renegade medicine man named Chidin (Eric Schweig), who is about as evil as they come. He and his ragtag band of white slavers have been plucking young women from ranches across the Territory, and are herding them down to Mexico for sale. Our searchers must find them before they get there; if they reach that border, they are lost forever.
This is a lot of political incorrectness for a director with a good guy image to heap on his plate, but Howard for the most part does it unflinchingly. Mexico is Mordor, no more, no less - once the girls have crossed that line, they will have sunk into a quicksand of evil from which there is no return or redemption. And Chidin has few redeeming social values, except for an impressive way with a magic spell. His ruffian Indians are low-lifes to a man. The movie does salt a couple of weasely white men into the band for balance, and later gives Samuel a noble Chihuahua Indian ally (Jay Tavare) for equal opportunity, but there's no mistaking who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are.
Things look up for our searchers when they encounter a U.S. Cavalry unit led by Val Kilmer, but his orders are to head north, so he doesn't do them much good. They're on their own, as we knew they had to be. Their journey is a journey of self-discovery and growing mutual understanding and respect, and when a semi-reconciliation of father and daughter finally takes place, they've been through a lot together, from flash floods to soul-wrestling.
Jones, an actor who has developed a specialty in pursuing fugitives, is a natural for this part. He brings a rugged and canny individualism to this man who has undergone a virtual culture-change operation, a man uncomfortable in the skin of a white man who has dedicated his life to seeking a fit that can never be fully realized. There are, however, a few moments where you suspect you've caught him being cool as an actor rather than as the character.
Blanchett is extraordinary. A woman who can make herself beautiful or plain by the force of her conviction, she enters totally into the person of this rawboned, forceful, guarded, disappointed frontier woman. There's a no-nonsense directness to Maggie, whether she's pulling a tooth or shooting a bad guy, or verbally flaying a delinquent father.
The screenplay by Ken Kaufman, a writer who seems to specialize in space movies ("Muppets from Space", "Space Cowboys"), is solid, although there are a few dodgy moments (mostly involving hair). It's adapted from the novel The Last Ride, by Thomas Eidson.
Ron Howard, whose calling card as a director is his remarkable diversity, has a sure feel for what makes a classic western. He works here with strands of psychological darkness, brutal violence, suspense, mystical deviousness, honor and dishonor, innocence and evil, personal intimacy, and the rugged vastness of the 19th century New Mexico landscape, and twists them altogether into a strong and binding rope.
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