The Forest for the Trees

There she goes: Cate Blanchett runs to the rescue.

The Missing picks up interesting trails, but loses its way.

by Cindy Fuchs

The most effective moments in Ron Howard’s The Missing concern Cate Blanchett’s face. As Maggie, a "healer" in 1885 New Mexico, she contends with any number of daily difficulties, from single-parenting her daughters -- fractious Lilly (Evan Rachel Wood) and solid citizen Dot (Jenna Boyd) -- to making time for stalwart lover Brake (Aaron Eckhart). Not to mention the healing. In her first scene, she yanks out an old woman’s bad tooth: As the patient wails, Maggie’s own face is hard. And oh yes, she asks, "Can you pay me for this today?"

Maggie's toughness is at once enhanced and complicated by Blanchett's stunning beauty, and she tends to select roles that frame her similarly, from Elizabeth and Charlotte Gray to Heaven and Veronica Guerin. Here, she's downright bedraggled by film's end, after spending weeks on dusty trails in search of Lilly, who is, within minutes of the film's start, kidnapped by a band of miscreants with plans to sell her to nasty Mexicans.

Maggie asks the sheriff (Clint Howard) to help, and he consults the military via telegraph, noting the wonders of the newfangled technology. Gazing outside while he natters, Maggie sees the fast-approaching future in the form of a voice-recording device, come to town with a fair. Feeling guilty that she made Lilly work instead of attending the fair, Maggie watches a girl smile as she hears herself. The reverse shot of Blanchett's face tells you everything you need to know, in one perfectly composed moment.

Salvatore Totino's camera repeatedly seeks out this face, and it never fails to convey complex emotional mixes. But while Maggie has wisdom and grit beyond most women in Westerns, she's also confined by an increasingly contrived plot. For one thing, there's her long-absent father, Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones), suddenly returned to atone for abandoning his family 20 years ago to live with the Chiricahua Apaches.

How fortunate: Not only can Samuel track the kidnappers, he's also guarded over by a mystic hawk, plays action hero (leaping through windows and off cliffs, punching and kicking) and has an old Indian buddy, Kayitah (Jay Tavare), seeking the same marauders who happen to have taken his son's wife-to-be. The saga that follows vaguely resembles The Searchers, with complications laid on top of those already structuring John Ford's original. Maggie the Indian-hater learns to appreciate Samuel's usefully potent magic, especially after she observes the cavalry, led by smarmy Lt. Ducharme (Val Kilmer), loot the home of a butchered white family.

But these bad boys have nothing on the head kidnapper, Pesh-Chidin (Eric Schweig). A psychotic Apache brujo (witch), he casts evil spells, big pimps those poor girls and snarls so as to accentuate the scars on his face (like a Halloween-mask reference to The Searchers' Cicatrice, played by Henry Brandon). The brujo's most disturbing trick, however, is wearing photos of his victims (which he forces a quaking white photographer to shoot for him) pinned to his vest. These little images, grimly haunting and glittering in the sun, point toward another recording technology, one that specifically captures faces.

While this technology grants the pleasure of Blanchett on a wide screen, for Pesh-Chidin, image-taking is a means to possess bodies, if not souls, to proclaim the supremacy of his will. His power is such that he lords over an oddly multiracial band of marauders (which serves as an example for Lt. Ducharme of the dangerous consequences of race-mixing -- obviously, he's not fond of Samuel either). Pesh-Chidin's gang includes whites and Indians (these last being disgruntled former cavalry scouts, mad at their abuse by racist white soldiers), now making money by way of the dominant capitalist system that has so abused them.

That they will be selling their "merchandise" south of the border only compounds the dilemmas that the film only touches on. Its focus remains resolute -- the father-daughter business. And so, Maggie and Samuel take on the role of John Wayne's Ethan without ever representing the truly invidious aspects of his narrow vision. With Kayitah and his son riding along as noble sidekicks, these searchers make use of multiple magics, bible passages as much as native spirit chants, along with some sharpshooting, in order to rescue the stolen girls and defeat their enemies.

Certainly, Samuel's devotion to the "Indian" ways is initially a problem for his daughter (he's like Dances With Wolves going home again), but her budding tolerance looks toward a melding of cultures that never quite occurs. If only the film might have managed its many strands in a less reductive form. As it is, The Missing indicts the general push of modernization, as white populations move west and south, glances briefly at other futures offered by technologies (recording and military) and can't quite grapple with the displacement that is the white settlers' lot, by definition.

The Missing

Directed by Ron Howard A Sony release Now playing at area theaters