Missing (1982, Costa-Gavras) (Patreon)

62/100

Spoilers ahoy (for real-world events).

Starts out right in Costa-Gavras' wheelhouse, as another casually horrific portrait of life in a police state. Exposition, such as it is, unfolds against a backdrop of constant nightmarish violence, which the characters (to whom we've barely been introduced) struggle to ignore; every conversation, no matter how mundane, is punctuated by the sound of offscreen gunfire, while walking virtually any distance involves stepping over bodies in the street. "There's no way that adding Jack Lemmon to this could possibly improve it," I thought, and I was right. But while the film definitely shifts into a more conventional mode after Charlie disappears, and never matches the power of that initial turmoil, the personality clash that pulls focus has plentiful pleasures of its own. (A lot of alliteration for anxious anchors, etc.) Lemmon, perhaps secure in the knowledge that Ed Horman will eventually see the error of his ways, really leans into the guy's most unappealing qualities, making him an especially self-righteous specimen of Assholus americanus. For a gratifyingly long time, Missing seems less interested in the search for Charles/Charlie than it does in the uneasy dynamic between his wife and his dad, with Ed not even trying to conceal his contempt for the "radical" who, in his addled mind, lured his weak-willed son to perdition. That Spacek portrays Beth as eminently sensible and reasonable throughout makes things a tad one-sided, perhaps, but in this context that's probably preferable to having them meet in the cozy middle somewhere. Watching her retain her self-possession in the face of his gradually faltering, privilege-enabled certitude is rewarding enough.

Eventually, of course, Missing does have to contend with Charles Horman's sad fate. That's when it starts getting hampered by standard based-on-a-true-story issues, as Costa-Gavras abruptly shifts focus to political questions—was Charles Horman murdered because he learned of U.S. involvement in the coup? did American officials sign off on the execution?—that understandably galvanize him but have no real bearing on what the movie has fundamentally been about up to that point. What's more, shock tactics that had been effective in reel one, when the coup was more or less still happening, come across as heavy-handed later on, due to their basic implausibility. While the timeline isn't always clear, dialogue suggests that they find Frank Teruggi's corpse roughly two weeks after the earthquake, which struck on 5 October 1973. Because I pay attention to that sort of thing, the sight of all those bodies—so many that the overflow can be seen silhouetted through the room's skylights—didn't have the intended effect on me; instead of being overwhelmed with sadness, I found myself wondering why putrefaction hadn't kicked in weeks ago. (They kinda try to cover this with a throwaway line about it being cold down there, but it's clearly not refrigerated.) In any case, the more invested Missing gets in what really happened to Charlie, dramatizing the contents of his notebooks via flashbacks, the more certain I became that Fitzcarraldo, Moonlighting and Smithereens were all better Palme d'Or choices that year. (Haven't yet seen Yol.) Only when Ed has to break the bad news to Beth—which he does with the simple, heartbreaking words "We're going home"—did it win me back.