Review
THE MISSING
Starring Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones
Directed by Ron Howard
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Could there be a more boring filmmaker than Ron Howard?
Since Night Shift, his comedy about morgue workers turned pimps, Howard’s movies have become synonymous with straightforward, uncreative, cheesy romanticism. And if the stories he films aren’t predisposed to a nostalgic, Capra-esque view of life, he’ll find a way to make them so.
After all, he won his Academy Award as best director for A Beautiful Mind – the best mediocre movie ever made. A movie that only succeeded on the strength of Russell Crowe’s performance. Without him – or an actor of equal power – A Beautiful Mind’s desperately slow pace and big budget, Happy Days mise en scene would have been unwatchable. But Howard got Crowe to play John Nash and the wrong person won an Oscar.
This time Ron Howard has convinced Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones to star in The Missing – his barely veiled reimagining of John Ford’s The Searchers – and the result is nowhere near as fortuitous as A Beautiful Mind. Their performances are mediocre at best, nowhere near their potential, and they do nothing to raise the quality of The Missing above Howard’s usual level of terminal blandness.
As wandering hunter Samuel Jones, Tommy Lee Jones affects a strange lilting speech pattern that seems to serve two purposes: to make him sound like a white man who’s lived with Indians and to express the kind heart within his gruff exterior. All it succeeds in doing is making him sound whiny and pathetic. Worse still, his "gone native" Jones comes off like a turn-of-the-century hippie with a bad mullet. Jones never makes us believe he belongs in the Old West, and, undoubtedly, Howard is at least partially to blame. If a proven actor can’t muster better than mediocrity, surely the director must bear some responsibility.
The same holds true for Blanchett, who has turned in her poorest performance to date. Rarely has an actress cried so incessantly and still been forced to maintain an illusion of strength. Tears are great, tears can be a strength – both in life and in performance – but watching an actor muster tears for nearly two-and-a-half hours becomes painful and makes her seem weak. And when she’s not crying she’s delivering racist epithets, feminizing John Wayne’s famous character from The Searchers, Ethan Edwards.
In fact, the only interesting performance in The Missing is a cameo by Val Kilmer. Perhaps it’s because he has so little to do, perhaps it’s because he doesn’t take direction well, or perhaps it’s because he’s simply comfortable in the Western genre – whatever the reason, his is the only performance worth watching in The Missing – and it’s too short lived.
Ultimately, The Missing breaks Ron Howard’s string of mediocrity by being both bad and boring. But it should do well at the box office regardless of its quality. After all, everyone loves Opie. |
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