The Missing
Directed by Ron Howard
"It’s only a movie!" is casually blurted out by filmgoers who don’t want to think. The phrase enables them to gloss over all manner of offense and avoid the social implications of art. When that happens, we get entertainment, weakly.
At the risk of seeming a Time-Warnerphobe, I want to address some of the consequences of Entertainment Weekly, the publication that most zealously represents the "It’s only a movie!" attitude. Its recent feature on "50 Greatest Tear-jerkers" listed Martin Ritt’s 1972 film Sounder way down (#42). Once hailed as a remarkable example of American humanist filmmaking (and Ritt’s finest achievement), Sounder got reduced by EW to a "Kleenex Moment":
"As Sounder [the hound dog belonging to a family of black sharecroppers during the Depression] chases the wagon that’s taking Nathan [father Paul Winfield] away, the deputy shoots our four-legged friend, who disappears into the woods to lick his wounds. Really, there are few sadder sights than a limping dog."
In pop culture there are few sights more maddening than seeing a great work of art stripped of its human essence. EW treats Sounder as if it were Disney’s Old Yeller–a blunder that exposes the magazine’s approach to pop as affluent kiddie fodder. When cultural journalism was healthier, critics proudly sought evidence of profundity and depth. Sounder was produced in an era when American filmmakers and audiences valued a critique of social conditions and admired signs of human endeavor every bit as much as the Italian Neorealists had. Today, that respect is reserved for Iranian movies. EW’s insistence on further reducing movies to a marketable commodity only recommends the shallowest audience response.
Sounder was, indeed, renowned for provoking tears, but audiences cried in recognition of the family’s struggle against social conditions and individual hostilities. Its great moments included the mother Rebecca’s (Cicely Tyson) careful admonishment to a hateful shopkeeper; the brilliant metaphor of a liberal white woman Mrs. Boatwright (Carmen Mathews) and the black family all fumbling with a road map; the schoolteacher (Janet MacLachlan) reciting W.E.B. DuBois by heart; and–most famously–the reunion scene where Nathan returns from prison. Its climactic widescreen image of a father’s arms outstretched to embrace the entire family was shown from the back–a universalizing icon. Pauline Kael described this scene as "a phenomenon... This scene will live, along with descriptive images of the terrified poor which Agee gave us, along with the Dorothea Lange faces. To audiences now, this homecoming scene could mean as much as that other great homecoming scene–the little colonel’s return from the war in The Birth of a Nation–did to early movie audiences. If so, it may help to right the balance, because this story of resilience and triumph is the birth of black consciousness on the screen." Kael’s broad statement overlooked Mario Van Peebles, Spencer Williams and Oscar Micheaux, but her impulse was better than EW’s calling the tv remake of Sounder "equally affecting."
EW isn’t concerned with black consciousness (the hiphop era provides most media outlets with the illusion of fair coverage). It’s shocking that a mass publication could be so far removed from identifying with black experience that only a dog wins its sympathy. Movie journalism–and curators–have allowed Sounder to slip from pop consciousness. This indifference to humanism in today’s film culture also explains the dismissal of Chen Kaige’s Together and Jim Sheridan’s In America. Like Sounder, they force you to think about the real world and demand more than mere entertainment.
"It’s only a movie!" is also the defense that most often excuses the films of Ron Howard, the former child actor who refused to grow up but, instead, chose to regress as a director of childish family movies–Cocoon, Willow, Apollo 13, Backdraft, Ransom, A Beautiful Mind and the new western The Missing.
Howard specializes in big-budget films with speciously wholesome themes that traduce the legacy of Hollywood entertainment into a tradition of mindless commercialism (The Missing restores and simplifies family values against social savagery). He makes feel-good movies that allow audiences to think they’ve dealt with some serious complication. Howard complements actor-director Clint Eastwood, who tends to make equally shallow feel-bad movies.
The way these directors fall back on genre conventions illustrates the downside of their tv backgrounds, settling for the easy paraphrase of drama rather than a depiction of issues that might be unresolvable. Howard and Eastwood make movies only as a sign of career success, not because they seek to go deeper into a subject and, with rare exception, usually wind up travestying whatever topic they approach. Howard’s A Beautiful Mind may be the most ridiculous film ever to win a Best Picture Oscar (turning a real-life story of psychosis into an action-adventure/love story). Critics didn’t properly lambaste it, subsequently accepting the ludicrous, sentimental premise as entertainment. That meant Howard got to work his bad magic once again.
The Missing is a new version of the old woman-in-the-wild movies that once starred Susan Hayward and Barbara Stanwyck; in recent decades the genre has been taken up–with post-feminist pretenses–by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa and River Wild and now the always-affected Cate Blanchett. She plays Maggie, a widow and local healer in 1885 working a ranch with her two daughters. Maggie gets unnerved when a stranger visits; it’s her estranged father (Tommy Lee Jones), who ran off to seek the ways of the Indian. Wearing long hair, a droopy hat and a haggard face, Dad (in fact, a Granddad–Patriarchy itself) arrives just in time to rescue Maggie’s oldest daughter, who has been kidnapped by a pack of white-slavers led by a ghoulish Indian witch-doctor.
Avoiding the saccharine, Howard works in almost every kind of cheap excitation: near-rape, slashings, gun-fights, dismemberments, bludgeoning, blinding, a stampede, rattlesnakes, demonic possession, even a mano-a-mano fight that leads to a leap off a high cliff. Trash isn’t a gaudy enough word to describe entertainment this formulaic; it’s laughably familiar and yet done for the most disingenuous purpose. Howard and his screenwriter Ken Kaufman ask audiences to stomach Maggie’s conflicted heroism by alluding to her abused past. Even Dad’s confession, "Stay or go there’s nothing a man can do to protect his family from himself," is just psycho-blather. Howard’s action cliches are employed single-mindedly and with only the most meretricious attempt at expressiveness–as when skinny Maggie finally scares off her attackers, a veritable exorcism.
Westerns once surveyed the issues that compose civilization. This is what gave Kevin Costner’s Open Range its beautiful clarity. Although The Missing is primarily dedicated to box-office exploitation and award-grubbing, the plot’s basic dynamic can’t help provoking some world-historical interest. In its simplification, Howard’s film resurrects some of the racial and cultural antagonism of the Indian Wars. Maggie and Dad’s personal differences over family custom, religion and race get resolved through an overriding ambivalence about Western expansion. She learns tolerance; he learns to ameliorate and sacrifice.
Howard’s codes for villainy and virtue go back to the worst of The Birth of a Nation (the evil darkie threatening the virginal white woman), but the actual dialogue is quite modern. "This whole territory’s going topsy-turvy," one character says. "Indians hangin’ with whites, whites hangin’ with Indians." The confused racism and confused history define The Missing–along with Ed Zwick’s The Last Samurai–as one of the first features to show the impact of 9/11. Both movies present ethically confused characters, and their dilemmas derive from politics. Howard’s bad guys are "Apache scouts formerly on Uncle Sam’s payroll." The terrorism that invades Maggie’s home started when "their chief was hanged by the Fourth Cavalry." The Missing updates the Western to show Americans caught up in the mess of geopolitics but doesn’t go any further than alluding to seriousness and then settling for entertainment. The French might salute Ron Howard’s method as cinema d’Opie. But The Missing is, plainly, a film by a dope.
