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Ron Howard’s first western, The Missing, doesn’t
exactly reinvent the genre. Set in turn-of-the-century New Mexico,
it’s a fairly standard piece of sagebrush hooey about a father,
Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones), who returns, unannounced and unwelcome,
to his daughter, Maggie (Cate Blanchett), almost 30 years after
abandoning her and her mother to live with Indians. Maggie has two
daughters, little Dot (Jenna Boyd) and teenage Lilly (Evan Rachel
Wood), and when the eldest is kidnapped by Apaches to be sold in
Mexico, Maggie overcomes her hatred of her father in order to engage
him in the pursuit.
The chase itself, across parched, picturesque terrain, is brutal
but unexciting, and the leader of the kidnappers, played by Eric
Schweig, is a dark, pockmarked goblin right out of the bad old days
of cowboys-and-Indians flicks. Lots of greasepaint in that war paint.
Some of the other performers, though, especially Jones and Blanchett
and Wood, boost the movie’s authenticity quotient. As Lilly, who
moves rapidly from whiner to revenger, Wood confirms the promise
she showed in Thirteen. Blanchett, as she already demonstrated
this year in Veronica Guerin, is capable of being extraordinary
amid ordinariness. She gives us a self-sufficient woman who is split
in two: a devout Christian who has long abhorred Indians, and a
capable healer who cannot heal her own emotional wounds. Jones’s
character, weathered as much by life as by the elements, wearing
his stringy hair below his shoulders, is convincingly native. You
can believe this man left his family because he felt born into the
wrong tribe. Now if only he had picked the right movie . . . (2
hrs.10 mins.; R) — PETER RAINER
Opens November 26
• Showtimes
& tickets (movietickets.com)
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