THE MISSING
Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten Grade: B Revolution Studios/Columbia Pictures Directed by: Ron Howard Written by: Ken Kaufman, novel by Thomas Eidson Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Kate Blanchett, Even Rachel Wood, Jenna Boyd Screened at: Regal 14th St., NYC, 11/19/03
"Timeline" takes us back 600 years, "The Gospel of John" and "The Passion of Christ" two thousand, and "Master and Commander" two hundred, which makes Ron Howard's "The Missing" positively current events. Howard, whose latest is nothing like his "A Beautiful Mind" (unless you equate the craziness of an evil Indian with the schizophrenia of John Nash), takes us into the New Mexico of 1885, a time that the Native Americans, still smarting from the pain visited upon them by European-Americans, opt for a strange kind of revenge. In Ken Kaufman's screenplay adapted from a Thomas Eidson's novel, Cate Blanchett is the empowered woman, losing her British accent in favor of a delightful Western twang while Tommy Lee Jones is aboard as a fake Indian an unusual guy who forsakes his heritage and family and dons the gear, language and insight of an Apache.
A story about redemption, courage, and a particular kind of barbarity, "The Missing" is photographed beautifully by Sal Totino in New Mexico, its red rocks and bright sun beckoning New Agers and sun-belt worshippers to this day. The tale is likely inspired by John Ford's four-star picture, "The Searchers," based on Alan LeMay's novel, a saga of a man's relentless search for his niece kidnapped by Indians.
Marlon Brando and the large number of Americans who believe that all Native Americans are noble might be disappointed to learn that in the latter part of the 19th century, some Indians were aiming not to get their land back but to kidnap women and sell them into slavery in Mexico. Once the shipment would arrive south of the border, all hope was lost, which means that Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) and Maggie Gilkeson (Cate Blanchett) must work fast to get back Maggie's daughter.
Howard ambitious work, filled with withcraft, mysticism and amulets of beads and crucifixes, opens on an isolated cabin deep into the New Mexico sticks, where Maggie plies her trade as a healer and in her spare hours makes time with her boyfriend Brake Baldwin (Aaron Eckhart wasted in a generic role). When Maggie's older daughter Lily (Evan Rachel Wood) heads for "the city" on horseback, she is kidnapped by Apaches led by Chidin (Eric Schweig), who is just about the most evil- looking, foul-thinking Indian ever to grace the screens in a Western. Determined to recover Lily before she crosses into Mexico, she reluctantly accepts the help of Jones, her estranged father who abandoned his family to go Indian decades earlier. Would we be giving away too much to say that Jones seeks and wins forgiveness from his daughter as a reward for hunting down the evil Chidin?
Jones does a mean accent as he talks Apache to both friendly Indians and foes (subtitles are included) though Jenna Boyd, in the role of Maggie's younger daughter Dot Gilkeson, never loses her twenty-first century all-American speech as the brave band set out against foes who greatly outnumber them and who are under the leadership of a mystic who can cause blindness and death by blowing a strange powder into the faces of his enemies. He can also cast evil spells from a mile or so away, requiring only the victim's brush with a few stuck hairs, thereby causing feverish symptoms in the woman who pursues him, while little Dot counters the illness visited upon her mom by reading about Abraham in her Old Testament.
The picture could easily be cut by ten or fifteen minutes by scratching some of the redundant, generic gunplay and concentrating instead on the cruel treatment of the bound and gagged women and the unusual treatment by Jones of his own family. The climactic scene between Jones and Chidin is a knockout, but here again Ron Howard depends on one of the oldest, formulaic treatments in the book: the showdown between the two head guys in each warring faction.
Rated R. 130 minutes.(c) 2003 by Harvey Karten at Harveycritic@cs.com
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