(1982, USA, 122 min.)
Dir. Costa-Gavras, Writ. Costa-Gavras, Donald Stewart
Starring: Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek, John Shea, Melanie
Mayron, Charles Cioffi, Janice Rule.
It only seems fitting to launch a Human Rights Film Festival
with a landmark human rights film. Cost-Gavras’s excellent 1982 political
thriller Missing remains an immensely
gripping and relevant film as it kicks off the first University of Ottawa Human
Rights Film Festival, held in collaboration with the Canadian Film Institute. Missing was rightly deemed a masterpiece
upon release, as it scooped the Palme d’Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival
(unanimously) as well as Best Actor honours for Jack Lemmon. It then went on to
earn four Academy Award nominations, for Best Picture, Best Actor (Lemmon),
Best Actress (Sissy Spacek), and Best Adapted Screenplay, the latter of which
won the prize for Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart. The hardware Missing collected during its initial
run, however, isn’t quite as notable as the legacy the film enjoys today.
Missing boldly
dramatizes a piece of history and holds accountable the members of government
who betrayed their own people. This week’s screening of Missing comes only a month after the fortieth anniversary of the
disappearance of the film’s subject, Charles Horman. Horman, an American
journalist, went missing during the chaos of the 1973 Chilean coup d’état led
by General Augusto Pinochet that ousted then-President Salvador Allende from
power. Missing dramatizes the events
leading up to Charles’s disappearance and the aftermath in which Charles’s
wife, Beth (Spacek), and his father, Ed (Lemmon), search for answers amidst the
rubble.
“What kind of a world is this?” Ed asks as he and Beth find
themselves exhausted with the mess through which they have sifted during their
search. It’s ambiguous whether Ed decries the political turmoil of Chile or the
ordered chaos of his home nation. Upon entering Chile, Ed finds himself
entangled in the same mess of bureaucratic red tape that Beth has been fighting
in the two weeks following Charles’s disappearance. Although Charles is
American, the stuffy suits at the American Consulate exert little effort in
finding him. The American diplomats bandy about theories that teeter upon a
game of blaming the victim and they greet any tangible lead that Beth or Ed
finds with apathy and indifference. Stalls and false starts make the search for
Charles an exhausting tease.
Ed and Beth learn that Charles and his friend, Terry
(Melanie Mayron), had stumbled upon American military officers who brazenly
alluded to the purpose of their presence in sunny Chile. Missing, like the book by Thomas Hauser on which it is based,
alleges that the American government played a key role in enabling and
executing the coup that saw a countless toll of innocent victims. People like
Charles Horman were just collateral damage in preserving a way of life.
Missing, released
nearly ten years after the events it depicts, has a great benefit of hindsight.
The film plays not merely as pure reportage, but as an encapsulation of
thrilling events that convey a sense of being there in the moment in which the
drama exploded; additionally, the story unfolds as a thoughtful thesis. Directed
with evocative realism and a delicate hand for symbolism—the image of a white
gunned down in the streets is haunting—Missing
both honours and furthers the hole in which Charles, Ed, and Beth fall. Costa-Gavras
and co-writer Donald Sutherland intuitively create a portrait of Chile that is
an absolute mess of violence, corruption, and deceit. The South American nation
comes off more favourably than the North American one from which the
disappeared ex-pat went missing, though, for the film refuses to let the
American government push the blame onto the nation dealing with the mess they
created.
The cost of the battle is high, though, as Missing delicately conveys with the
crumbling of Ed’s faith that results from his discoveries while looking into
his son’s disappearance. Ed is a proud, devoted American and a deeply religious
man. He has lived his life by the Book before jetting into Chile to clean up
what he thought was a mess created by his own son. Ed’s first reunion with Beth
is more of an altercation: little warmth can be felt between the two as Ed
hastens to suggest that Charles’s disappearance was a consequence of his and
Beth’s refusal to live a modest conformist life within America’s upper class. The
American way of life is perhaps the ultimate villain in this unnerving tale.
Ed eventually comes to see his own culpability in his son’s
disappearance. Ed, noting his disdain for the indifferent niceties he sees in
the American bureaucrats, realizes that Charles’s absence might have resulted
from Ed’s own failure to respond to his son’s restlessness with American
ideology. Ed learns too late that one cannot report that all is nice when it is
evidently not. Missing offers a fine allegorical
equivalent to this wholly superficial semblance of American normalcy in the symbol
of the Consulate’s meticulously landscaped garden that Ed notes is sadly void
of human activity. The garden, walled safely from the violence in the streets,
is a tidy and orderly microcosm for the self-serving façade that shakes Ed to
the core.
Lemmon’s turn as Ed marks one of the best performances of
his career. Missing gives Lemmon a
disarming dramatic range as he slowly erodes the protective barrier that Ed has
built to preserve his way of life. When Ed pleads for answers—any results be
they positive or negative—Lemmon conveys the devastation that occurs when one
values arbitrary social structures and veneers over the tangible human needs
that are far more urgent, and can be met far more easily when the tape is
removed. Spacek is equally fine as Beth. She provides an emotional counterpoint
to Lemmon’s stodgy Ed, playing a young American woman who remains idealistic
yet pragmatic because she is willing to see the corruption to which her
father-in-law is so willfully blind.
Costa-Gavras’ excellent Missing
remains a textbook example for dramatizing a tale ripped from the headlines. Missing not only provides a fine
theoretical account of the events that unfolded, but it offers a dramatic
rendering that embellishes the ambiguities in the story, thus using the
relatable human elements to convey a tale that feels urgent both to the
specificity of the historical event and to the universality of the details that
make the story so compelling. The film draws attention to its own provocative
interpretation of history in the notable title cards that introduce the film:
names have been altered to protect real people, Lemmon notes in voiceover, as
well as to protect the film itself. The film remains daringly relevant thirty
years after its production. Missing
could easily be a story told today.
Rating: ★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
*I usually don't give star ratings to classics, but this is one film you'll want to see.
***Please note that Joyce Horman (renamed Beth in the film) will attend the screening. ***
Rating: ★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
*I usually don't give star ratings to classics, but this is one film you'll want to see.
Missing screens: Thursday, Oct. 24 at the
Alumni Auditorium at the Jock Turcot Univeristy Centre, University of Ottawa (85 University St.) at 6:30 pm.
***Please note that Joyce Horman (renamed Beth in the film) will attend the screening. ***
Single tickets are $5
for students and CFI members and $10 for general admission.
Please visit www.cfi-icf.ca
for more info on films, tickets, and show times for the festival.
Also screening at the Human Rights Film Festival:
Hi-Ho Mistahey!: Friday, Oct. 25, 7:00 pm at Alumni Auditorium [review]
***Check back for
reviews of films screening at the festival***
