The 1982 political film, Missing, by Costa-Gavras (his first American production), is soon to be released on DVD by The Criterion Collection. It’s a good film, but not a great one. This is mostly because it lacks any real poetry, the way Ingmar Bergman’s anti-war film, Shame, has. Yes, it’s well plotted, well acted, well directed, and scrupulously avoids sentimentality. But it also avoids any real higher purpose. Yes, Costa-Gavras is perhaps the foremost political filmmaker of our time, but that does not absolve an artist for failing to strive to dig deeper, core into something more essential, or give a perspective on a known event in a different way that allows for a newer understanding. Of course, these things are not requirements, but they are the hallmarks of greatness.
Nonetheless, Missing is a very good film (it won the 1982 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival), a prose work, if not poetic; and the screenplay by Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart (which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay) wears its prosaicness in almost every scene that shows its protagonists relentlessly pushing for the truth. It also showcases probably the best acting performance of the late Jack Lemmon’s long career, and it makes one wish he had done more dramatic roles, for as great a comedic actor as he was (The Odd Couple, The Fortune Cookie, etc.), Woody Allen was correct when he claimed that drama was "sitting at the grownups’ table." It also features some good, if not daring, cinematography by Ricardo Aronovich (the shot of a government helicopter outside of the Horman’s hotel room is the best in the film), and a surprisingly understated musical score by Vangelis.
The film is about the 1973 kidnap, torture, and execution of Harvard graduate Charles Horman (John Shea), a naïve political dreamer from Middle America, who, with wife and friends, thought he could make a difference by publishing a left wing newspaper in Chile during the Marxist regime of the newly elected Salvador Allende. Then, when the CIA-backed coup of Augusto Pinochet occurred, he and his cronies were personae non grata. The film shows a bit of Horman’s life with his wife, Beth (Sissy Spacek), and friends, before he goes missing. After that, we get the appearance of Charles’ father, a conservative Christian Scientist businessman named Ed (Lemmon). Very much then happens in the film, save that Ed and Beth both get the runaround from scummy American political waterboys, and Ed grows more and more cynical, after, early on, believing that the American government could do no wrong and that neither Charles nor Beth could do no right.
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