Ray Pride

Cate Blanchett as John Wayne?

Drawn from a little-known pulp novel, "The Missing," Ron Howard's latest movie is a gritty, brutal, often unpleasant portrait of a family crisis in 1885 New Mexico, in what Howard describes as "warped and strange and tragic times."

Blanchett plays Maggie, a single mother of two daughters, trying to keep her family together when her estranged father Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) shows up on her stoop one day, followed by a band of white and Indian outlaws led by Pesh-Chidin (Native Canadian Eric Schweig, fully invested in the role) a maniacal Apache who follows, in Howard's words, "his own psychotic nature." The men kidnap girls for sex slavery. Maggie's oldest daughter, the rebellious Lilly (Evan Rachel Wood, from "Thirteen") is taken. Maggie and Jones set out to reclaim her daughter, against the indifference of the Army, the law and the unforgiving wilderness.

"It's an adult sophisticated kind of family story," Howard insists of his follow-up to "A Beautiful Mind." "The Missing" opens with Blanchett in the outhouse. "In the first few minutes of the movie, we wanted to say, even when life is good out there, it's hard," Howard says in the same animated fashion one remembers from his early years as an actor. "It's uncomfortable. In establishing the world, we're also saying, these aren't movie-star turns you're going to be watching, these are characters we're going to be trying to bring to the screen. I was staking out that ground."

Howard claims he wasn't especially looking for a Western after Disney fired him from its hundred-million-dollar-plus "The Alamo"--they wanted a PG-13 rating, but Howard and Grazer wanted to make a bloody, R-rated film like "The Missing"--but that this script appealed to him, with its dark and troubling canvas of revenge, and also the idea of working quickly, on locations in New Mexico and with a cinematographer (Salvatore Totino, who shot "Any Given Sunday" and "Changing Lanes") who had never considered shooting period pictures. (Totino's work is superb, a fresh eye cast upon an old genre.)

But he likes Westerns. "You know, the audience breaks into two groups. There's a large group that does yearn to see a Western and I think that group will find enough of what they expect to respond to it positively. But then there's this whole other group out there that says, `Western? I don't think so. Not interested.' My partner Brian Grazer was in that group. That's why I was so shocked when he loved the script. I read it, I love these characters, I love these situations, but I wonder what Brian's going to think. It's a Western and he hates `em. He doesn't believe in them!"

Gathering up steam to mimic Grazer's amped-up delivery, Howard says the producer said, "'Wow! Wow! It's so intense! And the violence is so original! And the emotional circumstances of these characters is moving!'" How do you get that into a marketing thing? It's kind of impossible. So the studio's just chosen to say, don't call it a Western.

Still, I had to wonder about how the endangerment to Lilly is shown. Unlike the 1950s discretion of a movie like "The Searchers," which "The Missing" invites comparisons to, Wood's character is repeatedly shown in peril: bound and gagged, threatened with rape, forced to eat dirt, lipsticked crudely (but next seen as carefully dolled-up as an Olsen twin on a first date). What were the boundaries?

"I wanted it to be, y'know, intense, but not, um, not graphic, not... I didn't necessarily want to play for shock value. But I did want to present sort of an authentic sense of the world and the times. You mentioned `The Searchers.' John Sayles, the writer ("Apollo 13," "Lone Star"), is a friend of mine. When I was telling him what I was doing, and the storyline, he said, `Well, that sounds a little like "The Searchers," a movie that I really like,' and I said, `Yeah, I like it, too, it's a lot like "The Searchers," except for theme, plot and characterization.'"

Okay, but the contrast that came to my mind is that in "The Searchers," John Wayne's character spends decades in the wilderness searching for his niece (who grows up to be Natalie Wood) who's lived all those years in the bed of an Indian. We never see that, but the secret beating heart of Ford's film is this all-consuming rage of Wayne's character, fearing the despoiling of his kin. In "The Missing," however, we get near-pornographic flashes of a beautiful teenager in bondage, being abused. "Look, it's the inciting incident," he tells me, using a screenwriting term that describes what sets a plot into motion. "A white girl taken by... Indians. And the pursuit, an attempt to rescue. That's taken from the pages of history. And other movies as well. But we do share that with `The Searchers,' certainly. But I think what I found interesting about the script when I read it was that the nature of the brujo"--Schweig's Apache madman antagonist--"was so strange and metaphysical and the father-daughter storyline between Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett was really relatable in contemporary terms."

So it's timeless? "You could literally pick this storyline up and put it into any city," he insists, "make a couple of changes and the basic storyline would still really work."

"The Missing" is now playing.

(2003-11-26)

Also by Ray Pride

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Tip of the Week
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The revolution will not be realized
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I miss the innocence
(2003-11-05)

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