There’s no denying that legendary director Ron Howard is pretty versatile, especially when you take into account how diverse his back catalogue really is – after all, this is a man who made a Splash, sent Tom Hanks to space and even has ventured into Whovillie when the mood took him. However, despite his jack-of-all-trades status (or hack-of-all-trades if you’re not a fan), the idea of a Ron Howard western still seems like a weirdly alien genre for the filmmaker to tackle, and yet in 2003, that’s exactly what we got in the form of the noticably cruel The Missing.
But while the film takes the original notion of The Searchers and leads it into far harsher territory, could Howard manage to tell the story of an estranged woman and her father uniting in the wake of a kidnapping in a way that doesn’t simply fall into the standard Cowboys vs Indians pitfalls that often trip up the western in this modern climate? I mean no, not really – but at least Ron is plainly trying here…
Absentee father Samuel Jones has returned to New Mexico in order to seek out and make peace with Magdalena “Maggie” Gilkeson, the daughter he abandoned decades ago in order to live a much different life with the Native Americans. Maggie, now a healer, obviously greets her former patriarch with an attitude colder than the winter that’s freezing up the ground, but while her elder, somewhat stuck-up daughter, Lilly, could care less about the new arrival, Maggie’s youngest, Dot, is fascinated by this grizzled, new arrival. Ultimately, Jones is turned away by his daughter, but she quickly comes seeking him out after her daughters trip out with hopeful boyfriend, Brake Baldwin, goes horribly wrong and they’re attacked by the followers of an renegade Apache witch – or Brujo – and Lilly is taken with other settler women to be sold into sex slavery in Mexico. While the army is on the case, they’re heading in the wrong direction and if El Brujo isn’t found within three days, he and his band will make it across the Mexican border and Lilly and their other prisoners will never be seen again. Forging an uneasy alliance with her father who is well versed in tracking, both Maggie and Dot form a ragtag rescue party to try an catch up.
However, El Brujo is not a man to be taken lightly as he has an array of various powders and enchantments in his creepy arsenal that cause some fairly gnarly side effects and as their pursuers get ever closer, the crafty witch proves to be an elusive foe to outwit. Still, that doesn’t stop Lilly from trying to escape on her own and Maggie, Dot and Jones even manage to score extra help in the form of a Chiricahua friend who is also hunting El Brujo due to the kidnapping of his son’s fiance. Can this group put aside old grievances and racial differences to steal back their loved ones in time before they’re condemned to a life of pain and misery?
So, I suppose I’d better address the usual elephant in the room when it comes to westerns and while The Missing does try to do what it can when it comes to avoiding demonising Native Americans chiefly by ensuring that the use of the Apache language was as authentic as possible. In fact, if Wikipedia is to be believed, the film received much glowing praise from Native American communities who claimed that it was one of the best uses of the dialect in cinema history. However, that doesn’t really alter the fact that we’re dealing with a film that not only predominantly features Tommy Lee Jones as a white man with all the “abilities” of an Apache, but has a Native American antagonist that is a scarred, deformed, literal witch with blackened fingernails and a mutilated face. Yes, there are other characters which attempt to balance out any imbalance and I’m not suggesting that there were no “bad” Apaches roaming the old west, but if you are particularly sensitive to such portrayals, The Missing may stoke some ire within you.
On the other hand, if you consider a western to just merely be a western to you and this sort of thing is simply coincidental to you, Ron Howard’s impressively cruel trip out west has a number of good things going for it. For a start we have Cate Blanchett involved which is always a good thing and while there’s an argument to be made that Tommy Lee Jones is veering plainly into white savior territory with his absentee father fully adopting the ways of the Apache, if anyone can pull off the role of a flawed, leathery man filled with regret, then the actor is usually at the top of that sheet list. But while the leads do exemplary work, they’re surrounded by some surprising, faces who pop up periodically as the film goes on with a pre-Dark Knight Aarron Eckhart turning up as Maggie’s hopeful (but utterly doomed) beau, a pre-Mad Men Elisabeth Moss as one of the kidnap victims, a post-Thirteen Evan Rachel Wood as Lilly and even a cameo by none other than Val Kilmer gracing the screen.
On the villain front, Howard gives us a ragged, sinister antagonist in the form of Eric Schweig’s mangled Brujo, Pesh-Chidin who with photographs tied to his shirt and the ability to kill with poison dust, feels like he’s stalked right out of a Wes Craven western, if such a thing had ever existed (The Little Last House On The Left On The Prarie, anyone?). Yes, he feels a little over designed for the stark film he’s in, but considering that Howard’s never quite made a full horror movie either, it’s interesting in seeing him flex those muscles.
Speaking of horror, Howard doubles down on delivering some truly nasty moments to truly sell the threat. Obviously the sex slave plot is impressively distasteful to start with, but when you figure that the victims (including Wood) spend the majority of the film strictly bound and gagged, it almost starts to wander into torture porn territory. Pushing things even further is some memorable deaths that include someone bleeding from the eyes after getting a face full of the Brujo’s powder and another instance of death by roasting in a sack over a camp fire is a particularly vicious one. However, while the strength of the performances and the strength of the tone of the film hold your attention, there’s a feeling that even taking into account that the film is western – which are normally sprawling, drawn out affairs, anyway – The Missing still blatantly feels as if it easily runs twenty minutes too long.
If you can reconcile with some rather thorny characterizations and an overtly old school mindset, The Missing has enough going on to make it a gripping, if harrowing, adventure – but you can’t help but feel that maybe if the film had played it’s mean, unsettling aspects with a more revisionist, exploitation style and not gone for some obvious Oscar bait (Bone Tomahawk is a good example) maybe The Missing could have been found all the more sooner.
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