Tagline: How far would you go, how much would you sacrifice to get back what you have lost?
In the 1880’s after a very long disappearance a father returns to find the family he left behind to live with the natives. His estranged daughter Maggie is not pleased by his sudden arrival. When Maggie’s daughter is kidnapped the two must work together to track down the evil pack of men that did this and get Maggie’s daughter back.
From Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, the Oscar-winning director-producer team of A Beautiful Mind comes The Missing, an action-filled suspense thriller and a powerful drama of love, forgiveness and redemption starring Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett. Set in the starkly beautiful but isolated and lawless wilderness of the American Southwest in 1885, The Missing tells the story of Maggie Gilkeson (Blanchett) and her estranged father Jones and how they are reunited by a terrifying crisis.
Maggie is a hard-working young woman devoted to raising her two young daughters, the teenage Lilly (Evan Rachel Wood) and the younger Dot (Jenna Boyd). To support herself, Maggie works the land and provides services as a healer. One day, Maggie’s father, Jones, who abandoned her when she was a child and spent 20 years with the Apache people, returns to reunite with his family but is rebuffed by his daughter. It is only after Lilly is abducted by Pesh-Chidin (Eric Schweig), a psychopathic killer with mystical powers, that Maggie turns to her father for help in getting her daughter back.
The killer and his renegade crew of desperados are terrorizing the desolate territory, kidnapping teenage girls to sell into slavery in Mexico and leaving a trail of death and horror behind them. In a tense race against time, Maggie and Jones struggle to overcome their differences and establish a bond of trust as they try to reach the abductors before they cross the Mexican border and Lilly is lost to them forever.
The Missing is an American Revisionist Western thriller film directed by Ron Howard, based on Thomas Eidson’s 1996 novel The Last Ride. The film is set in 1885 New Mexico Territory and is notable for the authentic use of the Apache language by various actors, some of whom spent long hours studying it. The film was produced by Revolution Studios, Imagine Entertainment, distributed by Columbia Pictures.
The film earned mixed reviews from critics, earning it a 58% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with one critic calling it: “an expertly acted and directed Western. But like other Ron Howard features, the movie is hardly subtle.” Philip French of The Observer referred to the film as Howard’s “finest film to date,” and Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune called it the “best and toughest western since Unforgiven.” The Missing grossed $27 million domestically and $11.4 million internationally for a worldwide total of $38.4 million.
Film Review for The Missing
he Missing announces its (corporate) intentions right from the start. It takes three minutes of studio logos, backed by reverent, repetitious white noise courtesy of James Horner, before we even get to the opening credits of this offensive, stillborn western. Marketed as a Blair Witch-type horror film,
The Missing is actually a racist, crocodile-tear-stained period screed sprung from the “aw shucks” psyche of everyone’s favorite Andy Griffith sidekick, little Ronny Howard. Your warning bell should sound the moment Tommy Lee Jones’s Samuel, looking for all intents and purposes like a sad-eyed, squeezable plush dog, rides into frame in full American Indian garb. Samuel hopes to reconcile with his estranged daughter, Maggie Gilkeson (Cate Blanchett), for reasons initially unspecified.
The boringly intense Blanchett will have none of it, passive-aggressively letting her live-in lover, Brake (Aaron Eckhart), expel Jones from the premises. But then some mean ol’ Native Americans kidnap Maggie’s eldest daughter, Lily (Evan Rachel Wood), ostensibly to sell her into Mexican slavery. Blanchett will have none of this either, and so sets out on a redemptive rescue with Daddy Jones and so-cute-you-want-to-throttle-her daughter Dot (Jenna Boyd).
Along the way, the politically correct The Missing schizophrenically changes gears between domestic melodrama, pseudo-feminist western, and magical-realist fantasy. Howard reveals himself as one of the dullest visual stylists working today; his constant close-ups and simplistic wide-shot symmetry possess none of the ‘scope profundity of John Ford’s thematically similar 7 Women.
And Howard’s view of the Indian characters, whether friend or foe, is exoticism at its worst. The white director’s image of another race’s humanity never extends beyond the crude idea of the noble savage. “Who is this smashed penis?” asks a villainous Indian at one point. It’s a question perhaps best directed at the idealist Opie, whose brain is still stuck in Mayberry.
The Missing (2003)
Directed by: Ron Howard
Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Cate Blanchett, Evan Rachel Wood, Jenna Boyd, Aaron Eckhart, Val Kilmer, Sergio Caldero, Eric Schweig, Steve Reevis, Jay Tavare
Screenplay by: Ken Kaufman
Cinematography by: Salvatore Totino
Film Editing by: Daniel P. Hanley, Mike Hill, Ron Vignone
Costume Design by: Julie Weiss
Set Decoration by: Wendy Ozols-Barnes
Music by: James Horner
MPAA Rating: R for violence.
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: November 26, 2003
Visits: 44
