Time was that you couldn't turn on the TV without being ridden down by some horse opera or other. They were churned out by the yard in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties and all had the usual stock characters, stock lines and stock plots. With the Sixties' counter-culture when, by definition, anything your ma and pa valued was to be rejected and then with the subsequent humiliation of the US in Vietnam, a debilitating lack of confidence set in in Hollywood and all the good guy/bad guy taming the west according to a rigid moral code began to seem more than faintly ridiculous. A series of oil crises didn't help and it must at times have seemed that the American Dream was finally over, so celebrating it with hog roasts and hoedowns became a touch infra dig. From there on in the West either had to be portrayed in a semi-ironic fashion a la Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kind or with the kind of pseudo realistic grit Hollywood cribbed - and, ironically, sanitised - from Sergio Leone' spaghetti westerns. Subsequent attempts have, in this writer's opinion usually failed - The Unforgiven was startlingly unoriginal despite what the pundits claim - and although yer' actual cowboy was now invariably dirty and unshaven rather than clean-cut and wholesome, the clichés lived on. The Missing is thus rather refreshing in that nothing is really cut and dried, the usual suspect round-up of characters is absent and it somehow avoids dishonesty. Yes, there's hokum aplenty, with director Ron Howard dipping his toe into native American culture (I really have no clue how authentic it is) in a very post-modern way. With The Missing, it's wise not to analyse too carefully or the whole thing might fall apart, but, for this writer at least, it is several cuts above similar fare. (I saw The Outlaw Josey Wales recently and was distinctly underwhelmed, although another recent 'western' The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Rober Ford was way better than many other films of its year.) The central relationship and reconciliation between renegade white man Tommy Lee Jones who had abandoned his family and lived as a native American, and Cate Blanchett as the daughter he more or less discarded is surprisingly delicately done and quite convincing. I especially like the touch where Lee Jones reappearance has apparently nothing to do with remorse but because a shaman told him 'treating his family well' was part of the cure if he wanted to recover from a rattlesnake bite. As usual, of course, 'our side' - that is Lee Jones, Blanchett, the daughter she sets out to rescue and the other kidnapped girls - has more than its fair share of good luck, and as the title begin to roll, evil is yet again vanquished and we can all get back to our nine-to-five existence again with a lighter heart. I was especially impressed with Lee Jones way with a vulture which he persuaded to lead him home rather than set about pecking at his supposedly dying body. But as I say, The Missing is several cuts about similar fare and can hold its head high. Recommended more than many.
Review of The Missing
