Santiago, 1973. The murderous coup d’etat that felled Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist government spills its terror into the streets. Masses begin to disappear. Bodies accumulate everywhere like neglected trash. After getting trapped out after curfew and spending a night scurrying from one hiding place to another, Beth Horman (Sissy Spacek) returns to find her home ransacked and her husband Charlie (John Shea), a young writer who may have heard a few things about the possible involvement of the CIA or the US State Department while visiting Viña del Mar, is nowhere to be found.
Charlie’s father Ed (Jack Lemmon) comes down from New York. He’s demure, a republican, a patriot, wears the silent majority’s suit, tie and hat, marking himself a yes man with every stammered “sir”—yet he gets no more genuine assistance from the US embassy or government officials than the suspiciously hippified Beth did on her own. An uneasy alliance and utter embodiment of the generation gap, Beth and Ed thus are united in their helplessness and persistence. They can’t pass ten minutes without the sound of gunfire breaking the silence, can’t walk down an avenue without pools of blood appearing beneath their feet, and soon get to feeling increasingly sure that Charlie’s dead, that everyone knows it, but no one wants to confirm it.
It was heavily researched and verified by Thomas Hauser for his book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice (1978), this story that is, of course, about an American, one of just a handful of foreign victims, something you can’t help but weigh against the thousands of Chilean nationals, so many still among the disappeared. But somehow this is what makes Missing (82), the American debut of writer/director Costa-Gavras, made for Universal, showered with Oscar nods, work in its very particular way. This is an especially scrupulous true story movie—I think it may have been the one that initiated the “docu-drama” designation—with not a single event depicted that did not have eyewitnesses. The near singularity of Horman’s case, its attack on the sense of entitlement and security that comes with certain passports, is one of the key subjects here, something emphasized above all in scenes of tourists trying to keep chipper as the tanks roll by and citizens are hauled away just beyond the hotel or restaurant windows. There’s the creeping sense of bloodshed and humiliation on display just being part of the travel package. If this was fiction it might have come from J.G. Ballard.
There is also, at the heart of this, a personal, more emotionally accessible story of a father only coming to know his son through tragedy. Presumably, this is how such a movie could be made in the Hollywood of the early ’80s, and it is in essence very moving. But the unacknowledged parallels between Ed and Charlie, conveyed here as virtually estranged, so deep are their conflicting ideals, are sometimes bluntly and unimaginatively conveyed, with Ed saying or doing some little thing and Beth simply pointing out that Charlie used to say or do just the same. There are moments of ostensible connection between Ed and Beth, and Charlie in absentia, that like the 100% synth score from Vangelis, a credit sandwiched between his equally godawful scores for Chariots of Fire (81) and Blade Runner (82), feel tokenistic, or rather academic in their emotionalism.
But the script, credited to Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart, does feature at least one crucial, very elegant method of linking father and son that necessarily requires the entire movie to bring itself to fruition and beautifully marries the theme of familial reconciliation with that of American vulnerability. The last thing Charlie half-jokingly says before he vanishes is: “They can’t hurt us—we’re Americans!” The last thing Ed says to the US officials before he flies back to America with Beth is: “I just thank God that we live in a country where we can still put people like you in jail!” They were wrong, needless to say, on both counts. Charlie was killed, and his fellow Americans that tacitly allowed if not actually aided in his execution were never brought to justice, thanks largely to classified documents. And Missing bristles with indignation.
Which brings us to the supplements on Criterion’s new two-disc set—they’re worth the effort even if you already know the movie itself. There’s a very good half-hour of interview with Costa-Gavras, who carefully lays out his intentions with the film—he always wanted Lemmon, then not known for drama—and an interview of equal length and substance with Joyce Horman, the real-life Beth Horman. There are also featurettes on the film’s Cannes reception—it shared the Palme d’Or with Yol (82)—and, most intriguing of all, on the ongoing lobbying of the US government to declassify documents that would confirm the exact involvement of Americans in the coup that ushered Augusto Pinochet into power. The title of Missing alludes to much more than the status of Charles Horman for some weeks in 1973—it directs us to the gaps in the official history that obscure the full measure of the grave darkness that has so long corroded US foreign policy.
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