And what a debut it was. Few studio-produced films with A-list stars cause the U.S. State Department to write three-page written responses, but that is precisely what happened two days before Missing debuted in theaters. Given his topical proclivities and uncanny ability to mix the emotional and the political, the Greek-born Costa-Gavras was particularly well-suited to the material, and he made the most of it. The themes were old hat for him, particularly the structuring narrative arc of a conservative character having his eyes opened to the realities of the world in which he lives, but in Missing he hones them to a sharp point with which he can jab the complacent from within.

Although the name of the country is never explicitly mentioned by any character in the film, Missing takes place in Chile during the 1973 coup led by the Chilean military against the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende. What was not known at the time, and has since come out via declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, is that the U.S. government was not only deeply involved in the coup, but helped plan and execute it. Caught up in the coup were thousands of people with leftist sensibilities, many of whom were rounded up and interned in Chile’s National Stadium. Many of them were tortured, and roughly 750 of them were summarily executed without any kind of trial. Among those were two Americans, and driving questions in Missing is how much the U.S. government knew about the deaths of the citizens they were supposed to be protecting.

The reason Costa-Gavras’s films are so affecting, and why those filmmakers and critics of a more pronounced political strip tend to dismiss his work, is because he evokes his larger themes through conventional narrative frameworks. He evokes global pain through the stories of individual characters, an approach that always carries the risk of hiding the many behind the few. Yet, in Missing it works because Costa-Gavras never lets us forget the bigger picture and uses his small-scale mystery as a means of both evoking more horrifying truths that arguably evade representation (how else do you cinematically convey hundreds of senseless murders outside of simply showing them?) and suggesting that such events are always a possibility. The underlying theme of every Costa-Gavras film can be summarized as “Be ever vigilant.”

He masterfully evokes the violence, chaos, and fear of a military coup even as he avoids direct representation of killing and torture. He constantly keeps the presence of the coup at the edges of the frame--bodies littering the streets, military vehicles driving in the background, loudspeakers booming warnings about the impending curfew. When the violence of the coup does take center stage, most notably in a harrowing sequence that takes place in a make-shift morgue littered with hundreds of unclaimed bodies and a surreal shot of a beautiful white horse galloping down a deserted street with a military vehicle seemingly pursuing it, the film takes on the liquid qualities of a nightmare.

The main character in Missing is Ed Horman (Jack Lemmon), a deeply conservative and self-assured New York businessman who travels to Chile when his son, Charlie (John Shea), disappears during the coup. In traveling so far to find him, it is clear that Ed loves his son, but he doesn’t understand him and in many ways doesn’t respect him. Ed’s ingrained conservatism and political tunnel vision make it impossible for him to grasp the significance of Charlie’s life abroad, working as a translator for a leftwing newspaper and dreaming of writing children’s books. It seems silly and fatuous to Ed, and at his worst he blames Charlie for his own disappearance, suggesting that, had he lived right (like his father), none of this would have happened.

Charlie, of course, is not present to bear witness to his father’s anger and frustration, so it is directed primarily at Beth (Sissy Spacek), Charlie’s wife who shares her husband’s sensibilities and refuses to believe that the U.S. officials with whom they are working don’t know anything about what has happened. To Ed, her fears are just outdated anti-American paranoia, but as the story progresses and he and Beth begin to dig up their own facts that contradict the official statements being given to them by various ambassadors and military men, a transformation takes place. Ed is not so much radicalized as he is awoken to the reality that his own government has interests that do not always align with the protection of individuals. When we first meet him, Ed sees “America” and “Americans” as the same thing and assumes that his government shares that view, but by the end of the film he comes to realize that the former is an abstraction that must be protected at all costs, even if that means the killing of some of the latter.

In adapting Thomas Hauser’s book The Execution of Charles Horman, Costa-Gavras and coscreenwriters Donald Stewart and John Nichols (the latter of whom was uncredited) keep their primary focus on Ed’s journey through the surreal, bureaucratic nightmare woven by U.S. and Chilean officials that leads to his political awakening, but they also flashback at various points to show Charlie before his disappearance. These sequences are usually motivated by various interviews, and the unreliability of memory is literalized at one point when Charlie’s arrest is envisioned several different ways (once with a military truck, once with a civilian truck). Yet, the difficulty of piecing together past events from fragments does not destabilize Costa-Gavras’s underlying emphasis on the unwavering nature of truth. It’s out there, the film contends, even as multiple forces work to hide and subvert it. Thus, Missing is a powerful testament to the perseverance of those who seek truth, and its vindication so many years later has only intensified its effect.

Copyright ©2008 James Kendrick

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