A Sore Spot
Frontier doctor Maggie Gilkeson (Cate Blanchett) probes a sore spot on the chest of her patient (Tommy Lee Jones) with knowing fingers. She presses a second time, then a third, and the glint in her eyes betrays a cruelty beneath its occupational precision. She's looking to extract a yelp. But her patient denies her the dubious satisfaction. He lets slip a kind of muffled snort, but he will go no further. Neither will she; she completes her diagnosis briskly, the fleeting cruelty seeping away, and prescribes a treatment.

Good actors have a way of building minor gestures and inflections into moments of profound significance. The above exchange is a minor one, less than two minutes of running time, and almost nothing is said. Yet it gives us all we need to know about the relationship between Maggie and her patient, Samuel Jones, who also happens to be her estranged father. Deserted by Samuel when she was very young, Maggie has grown up strong but resentful, a woman who prides herself on her scrupulous Christianity but denies her wayward father basic hospitality when he turns up at her ranch. She will treat him as a doctor, but will not permit him the food on her table. Samuel, for his part, is clearly after more than treatment for a torn muscle, but he will not confess regret over his past conduct. Circumstances prolong their reluctantly renewed association, but these are hard people living difficult lives, living them separately, and neither will give an inch.

A Western?
By this point, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with The Missing, the new Ron Howard project that looks suspiciously like a Western, judging by the way it is being promoted. At the level of plot, this is old-fashioned cowboys 'n' injuns. Those rascally Native Americans have abducted Maggie's daughter, and Maggie is forced to accept her father's help in tracking her down. The movie spends a lot of time and energy trying to talk us into overlooking the fact that this is basically cowboys and injuns. Samuel, for instance, abandoned Maggie and her mother in part because he went native, taking a wife with a local tribe. So you see, the good guy's really kind of an Indian. And the outlaws who are kidnapping girls and selling them south of the border are actually renegade Army scouts recruited to hunt down Indians. The fact that they are themselves Indians is supposed to be irrelevant.

Look, it's not easy to make Westerns anymore, and even less easy to regret the passing of the "us and them" perspective that fueled so many six-shooting matinees. What The Missing is trying to do, I think, is recuperate the genre for a kind of PC sensibility. On those terms it fails. For all the time and energy the screenplay spends debunking stereotypes, it brings in all manner of clichés in cooking up the film's main villain, an ugly-toothed, photograph-fearing Indian witch doctor who only speaks to us through subtitles. These reflexes have a history, and it's a painful one, and The Missing can't soothe it away, not in spite of but exactly because of its best intentions.

That being said, The Missing is still an enjoyable film, and its setting in late nineteenth century New Mexico is an important part of its success. In lesser films, the search for Maggie's daughter would also become, a little too conveniently, a process of reconciliation between father and daughter. At the level of character, unlike the level of plot, the movie refuses to settle for easy answers. Blanchett and Jones develop their characters not so much from a demonstration of changes, although their relationship does alter slightly. Instead, they opt for the harder task: making people too set in their ways to change seem real. The setting here is crucial. The frontier guarantees survival to no one, and any departure from routine in the outer or inner life might be a luxury you can't afford.

A Troubled Genre
When genre films happen to good actors, there's a temptation to go over the top in an effort to compensate for deficiencies in the script. Who can forget Ben Kingsley's hilariously desperate turn in Species? On the other hand, good actors can add genuine depth to otherwise shallow projects by contenting themselves with filling in around the edges and underplaying the more schematically emotive moments. Cate Blanchett, as she did in The Gift, takes the latter approach, making the most of scan opportunities. She's a famous master of accents, and once again she nails a dialect considerably removed from her native Australian delivery. More importantly, though, her face adds a raw expressiveness to instants that could have been simply thrown away. Consider Maggie's inspection of the scene of her daughter's abduction. She first encounters the murdered body of one of her farmhands. She doesn't have time to really mourn his passing; the fates of people more dear to her remain undetermined. Her face, for little more than a second, creases in a pang that is both a miniature grief and a regret that the grief is only miniature. Tommy Lee Jones, conversely, does more work with his voice her than with his subtly expressive face. When he explains his daughter's moods to his granddaughter by speculating that she "must have known great cruelty when she was young," he falters just enough to let you wonder how much of that cruelty he lays at his own feet.

These are subtle local touches in a film that's far from subtle in its broad strokes. But if The Missing is somehow less than the sum of its parts, it is also more than a failed attempt at a troubled genre. The hardness in Maggie and Samuel, their refusal to forgive and ask for forgiveness, belongs to another time and place. Or so we might think, except that the strength of the performances in The Missing leads us to ask whether we've strayed as far from such habits of mind as we'd like to believe.