University of Ottawa Human Rights Film Festival Review: Missing (1982)

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Cast: , ,
Director: Costa-Gavras
Country: USA
Genre: Drama | History | Mystery | Thriller


Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage of the University of Ottawa Human Rights Film Festival. For more information on the festival visit their website and follow the organizers on Twitter at @Canadian_Film and @uOttawa.

Writer and director Costa-Gavras first gained notoriety in 1969 with his political docu-drama Z (1969) and continued to be a political provocateur, but never as strongly as he was with Z until 1982’s Missing. At the time considered daring because it took on the policies of the United States in South America. Now, that kind of cinematic statement isn’t that remarkable given the voluminous amounts of films (documentary and fiction) that do that on a regular basis, so what about Missing makes it still so powerful?

It’s the story of two American ex-patriots living in Chile in 1973. Charlie (John Shea) is a writer for a left-wing newspaper and he’s married to Beth (Sissy Spacek). There is a military coup brewing and violence is everywhere. One night, when Charlie is at home and Beth is visiting some friends, Charlie is taken. Why or by whom is a big question, but all evidence points to the Chilean army who is rounding up or murdering political dissidents all over the country.

Costa-Gavras and co-writer Donald Stewart subtly infuse elements of Rashomon (1950) into the screenplay to add a layer of distrust and confusion onto a story already replete with both directed at the American government and the new Chilean regime that is throwing up as many roadblocks as the Consulate and Embassy are. They keep you guessing, along with Ed and Beth, as to the real reason why Charlie was arrested […]

Enter Charlie’s father Ed (Jack Lemmon), a wealthy businessman with Washington contacts, who flies down to aid in the search for his son. He and Beth do not get along because Ed thinks they do nothing, have no ambition and genuinely doesn’t like their way of life despite not knowing much if anything about it. By this time, Charlie has already been missing for two weeks and the Embassy says they’re doing what they can, but it feels like they’re just stringing the two along.

This all takes place in a briskly paced 45 minutes to hour of the film. Then in the second hour, the momentum flags, but I don’t think this was a mistake. The last hour of the film constitutes one week of searching and I think the slower pace pulls us in a bit more because it emphasizes the tedium of the same information being presented to Ed and Beth over and over, slowly getting leads that don’t really shed any light on the situation. It feels like a very cognizant decision by Costa-Gavras to dial back the pace and make the film almost boring so he could get the point of the slowness of bureaucracy and allude to the supposition that the American government wasn’t being entirely honest with Ed and Beth.

missing_2-1To answer my earlier question, Missing is still a powerful film because of how tense some sequences are and how it deals with the question of memory and the authenticity of people’s interpretation of events. We get the same information several times from different characters and each time it is a bit different. One sequence does this blatantly, having two neighbors recount Charlie’s abduction from their vantage point across the street. Both eye-witnesses claim similar scenarios but with different trucks, amounts of people, whether or not it was the military and so forth. Costa-Gavras and co-writer Donald Stewart subtly infuse elements of Rashomon (1950) into the screenplay to add a layer of distrust and confusion onto a story already replete with both directed at the American government and the new Chilean regime that is throwing up as many roadblocks as the Consulate and Embassy are. They keep you guessing, along with Ed and Beth, as to the real reason why Charlie was arrested, if he even was arrested or if he was disappeared by the Chilean government or by the U.S. government.

Costa-Gavras also doesn’t let himself get too much in the way of the proceedings. His directorial style is clean and distant, almost observational. Unlike his direct approach in Z, he uses more tracking shots, pans and medium shots. In Z, he was very up close and personal and created as much confusion with his camera as he did with the characters and the mob scenes. In Missing he lets the narrative create the confusion, and we are left to tag along with Beth and Ed as they discover new things about Charlie’s disappearance. The tension that arises is purely from the story and the situations, aided with some editing and camera work that never really lets us know what is going on. He mainly keeps the perspective of the character onscreen, be it Charlie Beth or Ed and his camera does not let us in on anything they are not privy to themselves.

[Costa-Gavras’s] directorial style is clean and distant, almost observational. Unlike his direct approach in Z, he uses more tracking shots, pans and medium shots. In Z, he was very up close and personal and created as much confusion with his camera as he did with the characters and the mob scenes. In Missing he lets the narrative create the confusion, and we are left to tag along with Beth and Ed as they discover new things about Charlie’s disappearance.

All of these touches would mean nothing if the leads were not up to snuff. Fortunately, Costa-Gavras was able to land Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon in the lead roles. Spacek here is unlike she normally is in her earlier work, where she normally plays the innocent who gets manipulated into things she doesn’t quite understand (such as in Badlands (1973) and Carrie (1976)) but here she is youthfully world-weary and clinically distrustful of most authority, especially governmental authority. She is cooperative with the Embassy’s investigation but only to a point. She refuses to give them a list of Charlie’s friends because she believes (probably rightfully) that everyone on the list would end up arrested withing a couple of days of the list’s delivery. She openly airs her mistrust to the officials, much to Ed’s disgust. She conducts her own side investigation and is so determined that eventually Ed joins her.

Jack Lemmon in the role of Ed reminds us (in case we’d somehow forgotten) that he was a superlative actor in any genre he was put into. He enters the film as a complacent businessman who has utmost faith that the Embassy and government will do everything to find his son. His gradual shift after being fed non-information over the course of a week draws him closer to his daughter-in-law than he ever thought possible. Lemmon’s work here is magnificent because of his shift in tone, from believing the Ambassador and Consulate over Beth to being just as openly defiant to them as she is. His frustration with a system he thought was there to help him is obvious in his face and his actions and the look of disappointment he gives when he realizes the Ambassador cares more about business interests than a missing American is stunning.

It’s true that Missing may not have the initial pull that it did, given the passing of time and the confluence of policy-challenging films that have beset us over the last decade-plus, but it still has intense power. It’s now not about challenging the U.S. government, it’s now about the love a father has for his son and the extreme circumstances it takes for him to realize how much he really does love his son. It’s more an emotional piece than a political one now and that actually makes it stronger. Political films tend to fade when the issue passes, like Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), but because Missing incorporated a human story into its commentary, it will likely last for a long time.

[notification type=”star”]88/100 ~ GREAT. Missing is more an emotional piece than a political one now and that actually makes it stronger. Political films tend to fade when the issue passes, like Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), but because Missing incorporated a human story into its commentary, it will likely last for a long time. [/notification]

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I believe film occupies a rare place as art, entertainment, historical records and pure joy. I love all films, good and bad, from every time period with an affinity to Classical Hollywood in general, but samurai, sci-fi and noir specifically. My BA is in Film Studies from Pitt and my MA is in Education. My goal is to be able to ignite a love of film in others that is similar to my own.