Missing

There are any number of films that came out when I was growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s that I had of course heard about when they came out, but never got to see in the theater because I would have been too young for them at the time. Another such film is Missing. So the last time it showed up on TCM I made a point to record it for the next time it showed up. That next time is tomorrow, May 13, at 3:00 PM.

The movie starts off on September 15, 1973. Charles Horman (John Shea) is riding in a car with his friend and presumptive co-worker Terry Simon (Melanie Mayron) being driven by a US diplomat with diplomatic plates. They're in Chile, riding back from the coastal resort of Viña Del Mar to Santiago, where Charles and Terry live and where Charles' wife Beth (Sissy Spacek) is waiting for them. They're stopped at a police checkpoint because four days earlier, there had been a coup in the country. Terry is somewhat thinking about leaving, but the airport is still closed, while Charles and Beth seem to show no desire to get out of what is clearly becoming a dangerous country.

Charles' job isn't fully made clear; he does some work translating articles for a local newspaper that one can guess opposes the new administration, and claims to be working on a novel. But they're also of the political persuasion that knows the wrong sort of people, as Charles is taking notes on what he's seen the past several days and is clearly worried about the new authorities finding those notes. Charles returns home the following morning, having had to spend the night in a hotel because of the curfew, and the next night when the couple is separated again, Beth returns home to find the house ransacked. And then Charles goes missing.

Beth tries to get help from the US Embassy, but feels like she's getting stonewalled. Back in the US, Charles' father Ed (Jack Lemmon) is a businessman with much more influence than the wife of a writer living thousands of miles away. Ed talks to a senator, a US Representative, and various people at the State Department, and feels like he too is getting the run-around. So he decided to fly to Chile to go look for his son himself.

At this point, we learn that father and son had some differences of opinion, with Dad thinking that perhaps his son should have been more careful; this obviously leads to all sorts of issues with his daughter-in-law too. But as Ed investigates, and in a series of flashbacks, we learn that Charles met some Americans in Viña Del Mar who claim to be involved with the US Navy and claim to have some involvement in helping to oust the previous president, something that would certainly explain why embassy staff are trying to give the Hormans the brushoff.

Missing is based on a true story, and is quite well-made as far as it goes, thanks to pretty good characterizations from Lemmon and Spacek. However, Missing also suffers a bit from omissions because of its basis on a true story. There's this impression that Chile just suddenly, magically had a US-engineered coup on September 11, 1973. Regarless of the extent to which the US was involved (the Nixon administration certainly would have hated a president like Allende who flirted with Marxism), the country had been unstable for some time at least since anti-Allende forces gained majorities in both houses of parliament in elections earlier that year. Certainly, things would have been deteriorating long enough that you'd expect normal people in the capital city to have an exit strategy. Also, a couple of Charles and Beth's American ex-pat friends are portrayed as being even more of the sort of people to wind up getting disappeared, except that they don't. Director Costa-Gavras had, a dozen years earlier, made Z, which was clearly about the military junta in his native Greece although he wisely doesn't mention Greece there. It makes for a better movie, I think, not that Missing is bad by any means. It just feels more unsubtle in its political views.

The bigger irony is that, in the intervening years -- I think I'd pin the shift to the start of the Barack Obama presidency -- there's been a sea-change in the perception of the US left and right to state power and the use of that power. Nowadays, it's those on the right who go on about "color revolutions" and how the western establishment attempts coups in other countries (eg. Ukraine in 2014) and goes after its political opponents (see the canceled presidential election in Romania last year for an example), while the left seems just fine with using state power against "populism". Not that anybody would have seen that coming when Missing was made. It's just an interesting point to ponder while watching the movie.