Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L Jr.
Screen INNOCENCE ABROAD COSTA-GAVRAS'S MISSING' UNLIKE THE CHARACTERS in Circle of Deceit, which I was discussing in my last column, those in Costa-Gavras's Missing are not alienated, existential...
...but as he has gradually gained access to places like this morgue, or to the huge sports stadium that now serves as a concentration camp, it has become harder and harder for him to remain unaffected...
...The only fact that concerns Ed Horman (Jack Lemmon) when he first arrives in the capital city is that his son has vanished during the coup...
...If we couldn't see events Ed's way like this, we wouldn't feel the impact that they ultimately have on him...
...I haven't read the Thomas Hauser book that Costa-Gavras has, in collaboration with screenwriter Donald Stewart, adapted for his film...
...They are an altogether less sophisticated group, and more satisfying...
...A soldier gratuitously kicks Charlie's pet duck out of the yard...
...The evidence drives him toward the truth as inexorably as the prisoner is driven forward by the rifle butt of the soldier...
...It's "my right," he says, and gives this guy a little lesson" in civics...
...The number and disposition of the soldiers changes, the jeep is transmogrified into the little truck, etc...
...What Ed learns is not only that the fascist brutality of the coup is inextricably mixed up in Charlie's disappearance, but that America is mixed up in the coup...
...Another says he was made to stand up in the back of a small truck...
...The lawsuit that the real Ed Horman did bring cost him a fortune, and got him nowhere...
...At the end of the film, as Ed and Beth are leaving to come home to America, Ed threatens to sue the State Department representatives who've deceived him all along...
...It is based on fact, on a true story of some Americans trapped in Pinochet's coup against Allende in Chile...
...The story the film tells is the mystery of Charlie's disappearance...
...We are inured to them...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Some say there were two carloads of soldiers...
...Some say there was only one...
...Our problem - the one that we in the audience have - is that we do know the things this movie is telling us...
...The latter is the truth that Charlie stumbled on by accident, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that cost him his life...
...Some say Charlie was taken away in a jeep...
...The film accomplishes this by filtering these crucial flashbacks, where Charlie's wife Beth (Sissy Spacek) and various others fill Ed in, through Ed's own consciousness...
...Missing is more concerned with the human facts it reveals...
...Like Circle, Missing is set in a third-world country caught in the midst of political upheaval...
...By telling us the story of a man who doesn't care about such truths, who has to learn them for himself, Missing finds a way to revive our own feelings about them...
...Ed is not a very sympathetic character, so Costa-Gavras needs a way to disarm our hostility toward him, to make us feel what he is going through...
...The repetitions that make the incident seem comical give it an increasing gravity as well...
...At least in Missing, perhaps, Ed finally does succeed in bringing some home truths home...
...Screen INNOCENCE ABROAD COSTA-GAVRAS'S MISSING' UNLIKE THE CHARACTERS in Circle of Deceit, which I was discussing in my last column, those in Costa-Gavras's Missing are not alienated, existential types...
...In the endless corridors and chambers where the dead have been stacked like cord wood, though they don't find Charlie, Beth does happen upon one of their friends, also missing since the coup...
...It makes the political truths with which Missing deals into something purely personal that can be conveyed by action - by the flawless performances that both Lemmon and Spacek give...
...Ed sounds almost like Malcolm X here, naively threatening to bring the chickens home to roost...
...It's Ed's...
...As each version is repeated, Charlie is pulled from the house in which he and Beth live...
...It takes on the qualities of a comic opera, which only confirms what Ed already thinks and makes him scoff at the witnesses...
...In being arrested again and again, Charlie begins to represent the thousands of others we have seen being rounded up...
...In the closing shot of the film, he at last manages to get back the body of his dead son...
...This Ed has to accept in the end...
...And even in them, Ed dominates what we see...
...Yet the fact is that no matter how the details of Charlie's arrest jump around, he is being dragged from his house in handcuffs every time...
...The country is never actually named, but the references to it are unmistakable...
...The ubiquity and redundancy of the process of arrest in a police state comes through, even to Ed...
...They are so palpably, undeniably true that we are numb with them...
...That the movie is his political education is what gives it its power...
...Ed's persistence eventually brings him and Beth to a vast, chilly underground warehouse in which hundreds and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of embalmed bodies have been stored awaiting identification...
...If it weren't for some flashbacks, Charlie wouldn't have much of a role in the film after the first quarter of an hour...
...It forces us to learn again, painfully, what we had already known and forgotten...
...Wherever this emphasis came from, it is the master stroke here...
...I'm not sure whether the book concentrates on Ed as exclusively as the movie does...
...Ed seizes on the inconsistencies as if they somehow invalidated the whole episode...
...And all the details shift and switch around before our eyes...
...Yet Missing isn't really Charlie's story...
...Despite the fact that the flashbacks are the one place where the film still seems to be about Charlie, they are where Costa-Gavras gets closest to Ed...
...Ed has tried from the beginning to ignore everything happening around him in order to concentrate on Charlie...
...Ed is a little skeptical even of this fact, for he suspects that his son, Charles (John Shea), whose politics he dislikes, invited trouble...
...The effect of these variations, as the duck goes flying over the fence in each one, is to give Charlie's arrest a certain ludicrousness...
...When one of them says coolly that that's his "privilege," Ed corrects the man...
...Within all the silly fluctuations, the ineradicable fact remains, and grows ever more enormous...
...The subtlety of how Costa-Gavras deals with Ed, and with us, is apparent at the point when several people who witnessed Charlie's arrest by the military report what they saw...
...Unlike Circle, this film doesn't use the suffering and the terror as a mere backdrop, a set before which its heroes can strut their emotions, or lack thereof...
...The film is over when that mystery is solved...
...We get right inside his paranoia...
Vol. 109 • April 1982 • No. 7
