User Reviews

I caught this film on television recently and was pulled in and had to watch to the end again. I have probably seen it twice before.

"Missing" is a powerful, fascinating movie that captures the hypocrisy and hubris of certain elements of US foreign policy and the reaction of the innocent public who get run over by such policies with searing clarity.

Jack Lemmon was never better in a dramatic role than in this film, to my mind. The neurotic tics and flip outs that he typically used in a dramatic role are restrained or non existent and his performance is perfect as the upstanding citizen who slowly comes to the realization that his own country, which he loves profoundly, likely had a hand in the death of his only son. Very, very impressive performance from an old pro.

Sissy Spacek as his daughter in law is also very good. I find her utterly believable in her role. She exudes a complex blend of strength, kindness, love and cynicism without ever having a false note. Very good as well.

The two leads are important, well casted and well acted, but the movie wouldn't work without the assorted cast members who play the US embassy officials. Exuding exactly the right amount of bureaucratic indifference disguised with polite helpfulness, shady sleaze wrapped in procedural rituals and ultimately, blatant ruthless expediency, all while making casual jokes, this collection of good old boys do a perfect job and are a chilling bunch.

I note as well that the film has aged very well. The styles are 70s but the film has taken on more of a documentary feel with the passage of time instead of that 70s flashback feel you get from other thrillers set in that period.

In addition, the direction is more focused and the story telling better than in some other films of a similar nature (I am thinking in particular of Syriana).

Bravo. A great film. Watch it. And then wonder if anyone has learned anything in the 35 years since the events documented went down.

I watched this film when I was younger and loved it. Seeing it again after many years, it's still riveting, but it has flaws in it, mainly the motivations of Charles, the man who goes missing. Why was he killed so indiscriminately? It was a pretty well known fact that the CIA and the US were behind the 9/11/73 (yes, the Chilean coup happened on Sept. 11th), and as far as the movie goes, Charles was never threatening to expose what was happening. There's even a NY Times reporter in the movie covering the coup, and she's never messed with. Plus there was a coup attempt a few months prior to the September one, and it (obviously) failed. The country was also in turmoil during the Allende years (lots of strikes, some local, some manufactured by the Americans), so the portrayal of Charles as a naive idealist strikes as false. Plus 2 other men who write for a left wing publication that Charles does are arrested, one is executed, the other is set free. So why was Charles considered such a threat? The movie never really explains.

Lemmon's character naivete works well (and it's one of his best performances). He's just a man who is looking for his son, and is outraged not only about his son and his son's fate, but of the sheer brutality (very well depicted in the movie) carried about by the coup leaders with backing from the US. Lemmon is a very proud American, so his beliefs are pretty much shot to hell by the end of the film, which shows the ugly side of US foreign policy. The official run around is in full swing and Lemmon's gets more and more infuriated at the lies and obfuscation of the US officials, and then it turns to fury as he discovers his son's fate.

A flawed but still great movie. As a man looking for his son, the film works wonders thanks to Lemmon and Spacek. As a political thriller, it works less well.

The photography is striking and the performances uniformly okay. There is a stunning shot in which a search is being made of a vast morgue and the camera tilts upward to show us the shadows of dozens of dead bodies sprawled on the glass skylight. Jack Lemon does "anxiety" pretty well and Sissy Spacek is a competent actress. It's the story of Lemon as an American businessman whose son goes missing during a coup in Chile. So, unable to get any information or cooperation over the phone, he flies to Chile and questions Charlie's wife, Spacek, the Americans at the embassy, and anyone else who will talk to him.

Lemon is at first irritated and treats Spacek as an irresponsible adolescent because she and Charlie were mixed up with some political group in a foreign country instead of building a business and living a bourgeois life back home. Oh, maybe "well meaning," sure, but not very realistic and it was none of their business. Gradually he learns that the group of young American idealists were considered dangerous by the military junta that assassinated the constitutionally elected head of government. The military were backed by the CIA, it is broadly hinted.

I didn't like the movie. It could only reach three types of people. (1) Those who never heard of a CIA-backed coup in Chile. (2) Those who know all about it and will applaud the condemnation of most of the American values on display. And (3) those who, like me, have a general understanding of what happened, who find the actions of the CIA despicable, and who resent being talked down to as if we were a gaggle of chimpanzees.

Really. Costa-Gavras is going to enlighten me about an American coup of a South American democracy for the advantage of American business interests? Hell, I owned a few shares of Anaconda Copper at the time, whose mines the constitutionally elected government of Chile had just nationalized -- and I wasn't particularly devastated by the loss of a few dollars in order to see democracy at work in one of the most civilized nations of the continent. The tragedy was seeing it turned into just another routine military dictatorship, making sure that pro-American business was carried on as usual.

What the director has done is produce a kind of training film for American jackasses. "See? This is how it really works." Jack Lemon is the proxy for the audience. He represents us. The perfervid but innocent kids that Charlie worked with were putting out a raggedy paper. Lemon is surprised to find that they were spending eighteen hours a day working on it. He thought they were sitting around smoking "pot" or lazing around on the beach, balling each other's girls. And the kids uncover dangerous information, like the US is sending a NAVAL ENGINEER to Bolivia, "a landlocked country." It's presented to us as shocking, but any of us can think of a dozen reasons why an engineer of any sort might be valuable in Bolivia or anyplace else. If Lemon represents us, the director (and writer) must believe our veins run with the blood of Neanderthals.

This is Costa-Gavras' least anti-American film but I don't like it. The script considers us all idiots and materialists. But mainly I dislike it because I don't like being preached to. Costa-Gavras can still reach me, but he's got to do better than dividing the world into simple good (them) and simple evil (us) before it happens. If he's going to propagandize us, let him do a better job.

This movie Missing will stay with you forever.I saw this movie for the very first time years and years ago on cable television.I just watched it again on the Sundance channel a few nights ago.I love the soundtrack in this film.It has a beauty and an edge to it,that adds to the atmosphere of the story.Jack Lemmon was powerful as the distraught father of his missing son. Sissy Spacek was perfect as the wife Beth,and the daughter in law of Jack Lemmon's character.The entire cast was excellent.The locations and the scenery of this film was done very well.When you watch Missing,your heart just breaks for the father and the wife,and you just can't stop watching.I cannot imagine going through what these people had to go through.I highly recommend this film.

During the Cold War (1945-1990) it was the policy of successive US governments to maintain authoritarian right –wing governments in power all around the world if there was a possibility that they might be replaced by one from the left, democratic or otherwise. As the US ambassador in this film reminds us `we act in the interests of the United States', not in the interests of the country which happens to be suffering under a fascist dictatorship. We can accept this on an intellectual level – how else can the US government establishment act - but in this movie Costa-Gavras uses his very considerable skills as a film-maker to rouse even diehard conservatives to anger over the methods used to ensure Pax Americana.

He does this by dramatising the real-life story of one of their number, Ed Holman (Jack Lemmon), a businessman from New York and a crusty Christian Scientist with faith in Truth, into the aftermath of a military coup in an un-named South American country the capital of which is called Santiago. (I think we can safely assume the country is Chile, though the locations appear to be Mexican.) His son Charles (John Shea), a vaguely left-wing journalist and writer, living in the city with his wife Beth (Sissy Spacek), has disappeared after being arrested a few days after the coup and carted off to a makeshift concentration camp in the National Stadium. Initially, Ed believes the people at the American consulate and embassy really are there to help him, but it soon turns out they have an agenda of their own. Ed and his son's wife start out on bad terms but Ed comes to appreciate her bravery in the face of a very unstable situation. He also comes to realise the moral worth of his son, who he had previously regarded as a bit of a playboy, much as he had loved him,.

An almost surreal feature of the movie is that people behave almost normally despite the obvious signs of murder and mayhem going on in the background. In fact the only time the `comfortable classes' are disturbed is when there is an earthquake affecting Ed's Santiago hotel. Otherwise, the guests are happy to watch from the upstairs terrace the military killing people in the streets. Of course General Pinochet still has considerable support in Chile, and in August 2000 your reviewer witnessed a large demonstration outside the Supreme Court in Santiago against a decision lifting the Life Senator's immunity from prosecution. It was a very well-dressed crowd.

Ed's odyssey through hospitals, morgues, police stations and the National Stadium is intercut with flashbacks which make it plain enough what has happened. Yet in classic thriller fashion we are kept on the edge of our seats with what will happen next. Politics aside, this film succeeds as a thriller involving believable people rather than stereotypes. Jack Lemmon gives the dramatic performance of a lifetime as Ed, the fuddy-duddy who really does care and leaves no stone unturned to find the truth.

Nearly 30 years later, Chile has a democratic government, Pinochet is too infirm to stand trial, Nixon is dead and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is an elder statesman on the celebrity circuit. The only communist regime in Latin America, Castro's Cuba, is still there. This film reminds us that immoral policy, whether or not it achieves its objectives, remains immoral. The fact that US foreign policy is regarded as being in the interests of the United States does not make it more moral, even if you happen to be a citizen of that country, where as Ed reminds us at the end, remains one in which you can at least sue for justice. Sadly, Ed did not succeed.

Praised as a Political director, Costa-Gavras is of interest less for his finally unsophisticated analyzes of government intrigue than for the way he manages to frame his impassioned polemics within a popular and entertaining format…

Inspired by the disappearance of a young American during the coup, the film lacks moral complexity, but finds an admirable audience surrogate in the boy's Republican father, who is slowly educated in the imperialist hypocrisy of American foreign policy when he repeatedly encounters ambassadorial lies concerning his son's death… Most affecting is the evocation of a country under martial law falling apart at the seams: shots ring in the night, a white stallion gallops through the curfew pursued by a truck full of trigger-happy soldiers…

Not surprisingly, Costa-Gavras' "conjectural" film provoked the wrath of the US State Department

MISSING is an excellent movie telling the story of American businessman Ed Horman and his struggle to recover his son, who vanished during a coup in Chile in the 1970s. Jack Lemmon is Horman and he's brilliant...he's mannered yes, but his "acting" is perfect for this role...you feel his frustration with both the US and the Chilean governments. He encounters endless bureaucracy in his search. He's helped a lot by daughter-in-law Beth, played by Sissy Spacek in a performance of remarkable restraint. The great supporting cast includes Janice Rule, Melanie Mayron and David Clennon as a less than helpful government man. John Shea plays the missing son and he's terrific.

MISSING is sad, scary and heartbreaking...directed, with his usual gravitas, by Costa-Gavras