Nyx and I caught The Missing yesterday, over at the swanky Greenbelt 3 cinemas. You gotta love a waiting lounge that lets its guests relax on an assortment of mattresses, recliners and beanbags. I wish I had spent some time on the big mattress; I had no idea that that would’ve been the best part of seeing this film.
You know what burns me the most about The Missing? It had a lot of talent going for it, but no real vision. Ron Howard, Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones have all made good, good movies, but here they all seem … uninspired. Maybe it was the material. Frontier westerns are always difficult to pull off, especially when your director’s main strength is in making light-hearted family movies. The main problem with the first 15 minutes of the film, imo, was that Howard tried too hard to make it feel like a frontier western. He showed, in rapid succession, Blanchett wiping her ass with a shred of newspaper, a rotten tooth that is pulled out with a pair of tongs, a deer being skinned, a cow being milked, Tommy Lee Jones chanting an indian prayer. Howard was trying to strike a chord in the audience that would make them say, “Wow, I feel like I’m really there,” but all of those efforts feel sadly short.
He spends so much time talking about the frontier in fact, that he forgets to build up the suspense for Blanchett’s “horrifying” discovery in the woods. So when we actually see it, we’re surprised not in a horrified way, but in a “where the hell did that come from? we were watching a family movie 3 minutes ago” sort of way. There is no sense of foreboding or tension or anything that would make something like this engaging to see. When Blanchett and Jones finally go off to rescue her missing daughter (who has been taken by slave-traders), I start counting the minutes till the movie ended.
The Missing is filled with little snippets of Howard’s memories of good westerns. We have sub-stories involving the colonial army, a wimpy photographer, a flooding canyon, etc., none of them really relevant.
When the movie suddenly turns supernatural on us (in a weird voodoo-esque sequence that has Jones and company praying over Blanchett), we’re literally left in the dust. They wouldn’t've even had that long-ass scene if Blanchett’s comb hadn’t fallen out of her bag for the witch-doctor to find. Talk about convenient.
In another hokey sequence, we see the witch-doctor abduct a young mother, whose baby is sleeping fitfully in bed several feet away. Later we see the mother in chains, along with her child. What the hell? He was only going to sell the mother, what was he gonna do, eat the baby? Later I realized that it was a plot device: when the child dies in captivity, the mom goes nuts, shoots herself and foils the big escape attempt. I was like, “so that’s what the baby was for!” (slaps self on forehead)
The whole movie is like this. We’re made to slog along with Blanchett as she makes her way around the haphazard plot, hoping that each poorly-directed sequence is the last. When it finally is, it’s a mercy.