by Frank Wilkins
Watching a film directed by Ron Howard is always a lesson in filmmaking. He understands how to frame a shot, how to manipulate the audience and he always gets the most from his actors. Undoubtedly, he is a master of the technical aspects of making a fine motion picture. One thing always missing from a Ron Howard film however, is the artistic creativity that puts a film on a higher level of achievement. Whereas a true practitioner of the art form will inject a film with multiple layers of subjective meaning and enrich it with metaphors, Howard prefers an A to Z style of no-nonsense filmmaking.

In 2002 he dabbled with the finer aspects of the art form. Audiences were rewarded with A Beautiful Mind and Howard was awarded a best picture Oscar. With The Missing, Howard displays masterful skills of a tradesman at the top of his game, yet he never strays from his pragmatic method of storytelling, thereby preventing this film from achieving what it could have been.

The mystical, supernatural powers of the Native American culture offers Howard a perfect opportunity to inject a second layer of context to The Missing, but he doesn't take the bait. While the film is a shiny gem on the Western genre landscape, it just missed becoming that one-of-a-kind canary diamond. It's fool's gold if you will.

The story, at its core, is that of a woman's love for her children and of an estranged father bent to make amends. Maggie Gilkeson (Cate Blanchett) is a single mother living in the New Mexico Wilderness in the late 1800s. When she was young, her father, Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) abandoned his family to live amongst various Indian tribes. Maggie is now raising two daughters, the stubborn pre-teen Dot (Jenna Boyd) in whom Maggie sees a lot of her own spunkiness, and teenager Lilly (Evan Rachel Wood) an independent spirit looking to leave her mother's apron strings. Based on the novel The Last Ride, screenwriter Thomas Eidson builds great emotional depth into the characters. As the story unfolds, he gradually peels away Maggie's shell to reveal why she is the woman she has become.

When a roaming tribe of Apache Indians kidnaps Lilly, Maggie understands that she must temporarily mend ways with her father and allow him to guide her to her daughters' captors. As Maggie and Jones pursue the kidnappers, we get a great sense of the hardships that come from living in the Western wilderness. Atmosphere becomes a prominent character as Howard fills the screen with awesome sunsets and harrowing floods. Much in the same way that Sydney Pollack depicted it in Jeremiah Johnson, nature becomes an enemy much more formidable than humans.

The Missing is a marvel to watch. With a runtime of 130 minutes, it's a bit long, but I never found myself wishing for it the end. Howard has created a technically astute film with phenomenal acting and brilliant cinematography. But I'd like to see him explore filmmaking more as an art form and less as a means of telling a forthright story.

Frank Wilkins