Gone native
Mark Steyn
The Missing 15, selected cinemas
Itprobably wasn't a good idea to call it The Missing, because in idle moments during this long film's many lorigueurs you can't help speculating on what it is that's actually gone missing.
Plot-wise, it's a teenage girl, Lily Gilkeson (played by Evan Rachel Wood). She lives in a cabin on a grim patch of prairie out in New Mexico Territory in the 1880s, and is a-hankerin' for brighter lights. She'd break out into Ev'rything's up to date in Kansas City/They've gone about as fer as they can go' if only she knew someone who'd been there. But, if she wanted to travel, she's about to get the chance. While out and about one day, she gets kidnapped by Apaches, who set off for Mexico in order to sell her into white slavery south of the border. It's not exactly a weekend in Chicago, but at least she's not moping about with cabin fever any more.
Mom (Cate Blanchett) sets off in pursuit, aided only by a conveniently available taciturn weatherbeaten loner who knows the ways of the red man. He happens to be her dad, but he skipped out and has spent the last 20 years living with the Apache, learning their customs, like how to grow your hair really long. This is Tommy Lee Jones, playing a man called Samuel Jones. If the hair had been any bigger, he could have played Paula Jones. Obviously, when you put one fiercely independent woman and a craggy geezer a little too fond of the firewater up against a brutal Injun gang, it's no contest. So they take mom's tenyear-old daughter along with them to even up the score.
In other words, it's The Searchers, but worse. Ron Howard doesn't think of it that way, of course. He opens with Cate Blanchett on the privy, to tell us that this isn't going to be the old-style head-'em-offat-the-pass western but the new gritty raw meanwhile-back-at-the-outhouse western. Miss Blanchett is so good and so versatile — she can do any accent, any period — that she seems just to pick her scripts blindfold out of a brand tub. Here she's severe but good-hearted: she lets the hired man shag her but won't let him sleep in the house. She's got the look just right — the squint, the contortions of the mouth, the way a tough land and hard weather turn the face into a kind of protective crust. But the character seems an attitude rather than a living being. As for Tommy Lee Jones, the deadbeat dad gone native, he successfully avoids falling into parody, which is probably the most one can expect from the role.
But the big problem is Ron Howard, a nervous nellie of a director who spends so much time covering his politically correct bases that in the end the story goes missing. Howard is a four-square dramatist, which on the right project (Apollo 13) can work perfectly well. But here it just seems ham-fisted. The bad guy, amazingly, is still an Injun, the baddest Injun you ever met, played by Eric Schweig with a face covered in prosthetic pockmarks. Evidently he did a lot of drugs in the Sixties — the 180s, that is. The white slavery thing is even more perplexing. There appears to be zero historical evidence that Indians were involved in any cross-border sex traffic, and you can't help marvelling at Howard's saddling them with it. But then he includes a scene, right after the kidnapping, where it's explained that the gang won't rape the womenfolk or even slap 'em around a little, in case they damage the goods before they get them to market. And you realise the whole white slavery gig's a sham — a way of ensuring that Howard doesn't have to show the Indians doing to young Lily what most abductors in that period would have done to her. And then he reveals that anyway they're rogue Apaches who used to work with the US forces — i.e., this is all the white man's fault. Oh, and there's palefaces in the Apache gang anyway, apparently 'celebrating diversity' — just as the good guys also benefit from a couple of helpful Native Americans, It's all a bit too self-conscious.
Miss Blanchett plays a devout Christian and, whenever she starts praying to her God, Tommy Lee Jones starts chanting to his. The mystical shamanesque aspects seem more like a gloss of California New Age mumbo-jumbo than anything you'd be likely to find in New Mexico 120 years ago. By contrast, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books have a refreshingly honest attitude to religion out west. But Howard is so busy covering himself he doesn't seem to notice his characters are burdened by so many sensitivity requirements they never come to life.
To cut a long story short, they don't cut a long story short. It goes on for hours. By about midway through I realised that, while the kidnapped Lily may no longer be suffering from cabin fever, I certainly was.
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