Missing (1982)

Director: Costa-Gavras
Writers: Costa-Gavras and Donald E. Stewart, based on the book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice by Thomas Hauser
Stars: Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek, Melanie Mayron and John Shea

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Jack Lemmon was nominated for an Oscar on eight films. The first was for Mister Roberts in 1955, for which he won as Best Supporting Actor, and I coincidentally watched that this week as prep for its sequel in Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty. Now I’m watching Missing for his centennial, as it was the last of the eight nods, this time as Best Actor. He lost to Ben Kingsley for the year’s biggest picture, Gandhi.

It’s also a rather timely film, given the news of late, as it’s the true story of a coup, in Chile in 1973, when the U.S. aided the removal of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, in favour of a brutal military regime run by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

More specifically, given that most of those names, like Allende, Pinochet and even Chile, are carefully never mentioned in the film, it’s a look at the effect of such a coup on a family. The missing man is Charlie Horman, a writer from New York state, and much of the movie is dedicated to the search for him by his wife Beth and his father Ed, the latter of whom has flown out specially after not getting answers he likes from the powers that be back home.

Of course, Jack Lemmon plays Ed Horman, a traditional businessman who believes in truth, justice and the American way. He’s not a bad man but, as soon as he lands, it’s clear that he blames Charlie and Beth for what happened. He honestly asks her what his son did and he doesn’t want to hear her “anti-establishment paranoia”. Quite obviously, they’re not on the same page and meetings with the ambassador underline that. Ed’s polite, while they ask for a list of Charlie’s friends and suggest he’s in hiding only to embarrass his government. On the other hand, Beth’s flippant and calls them on their crap. She knows that’s what it is.

Fortunately, Beth is played by Sissy Spacek, one of Hollywood’s most powerful actresses. It helps that we spend time with her and Charlie first, as the coup happens. She gets impactful scenes before Jack Lemmon shows up, surely the most terrifying of which is her out at night after curfew, having missed her bus home.

She flinches at random gunshots, walks past bloody bodies lying in the streets. Soldiers are everywhere, even burning books in a square. The buses are full and the taxis refuse to stop. She hides in the entryway to a bridal shop but the owner chases her away; he doesn’t want to see foreigners. She sleeps in a hidden doorway and wakes only to see a jeep of soldiers scare a white horse down the street with bullets. It’s a surreal and nightmarish sequence.

While it’s Lemmon who first uses the word “coup” when he shows up twenty-five minutes into the picture, he didn’t see any of this. He’s blissfully unaware of the reality of the country and thinks that simply being an American will be enough for him to find his foolish boy and take him home. While he’s strong as the naïve Ed, the reason he was Oscar nominated is how he changes as the film runs on. Eventually, of course, reality asserts itself and he has to shift his perspectives. He even has the character to apologise to Beth, once he realises what she’s been through, that she and his son truly loved each other and that he’d misjudged them both horribly. He even asks her to tell him what his son was like. She knows better than he does.

Eventually, of course, they find the answer, which does not come close to a happy ending, but is at least closure. Then again, this is a true story and that outcome is rather given away in the title of the source book. Ed, who becomes very aware of the realities of the world while he’s in Chile, leaves the country promising to sue various American government officials for negligence. In reality, he did, eleven of them, a case that was eventually dismissed.

I found it an incredibly powerful film, one of many political thrillers made by Costa-Gavras, the Greek filmmaker behind the 1969 film Z, a rare title to be nominated for Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film.

Many scenes are searing in many different ways. The scenes outside at night are palpably dangerous. The scenes at the ambassador’s are absolutely not but, as we learn to discern truth from lies, they’re painful. Of course, some are overtly emotional, like a trip Beth and Ed take to see los perdidos, the nameless victims kept in a hospital basement; or another to look at the countless unidentified dead. That scene is the one that will haunt me. Of course, they don’t find Charlie, but they do find a friend of his, a friend that the State Department told Ed was released and went home. It’s as they struggle with that discovery that they look up and see a fresh batch of corpses laid out on the skylight.

Time was that I knew Jack Lemmon not for impactful political thrillers but for comedies, The Guardian calling him “the most successful tragi-comedian of his age”. His film debut was in a Judy Holliday comedy, It Should Happen to You; his first Oscar was won for a Henry Fonda comedy, Mister Roberts; and he’s best known to posterity for Billy Wilder comedies, beginning with Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, both of which landed him further Oscar nods.

Of course, there were serious sides to many of those films but his first serious drama, Days of Wine and Roses in 1962, ironically for comedy director Blake Edwards, opened him up for an array of different roles, many of which would also land him Oscar nods, including this one.

He finally won Best Actor for 1973’s Save the Tiger, so becoming the first male actor to win both acting awards. That was another serious drama in which he plays a businessman who tries to avoid bankruptcy by hiring an arsonist to burn down his warehouse. He landed a nod for the disaster movie The China Syndrome and he won Best Actor at Cannes for Missing.

However, it’s hard to forget his comedies. In fact, it’s hard to pick a favourite from them. It ought to be hard to look past absolute classics like Some Like It Hot and https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/03/apartment-1960.html, but not in a career that also featured The Great Race, The Fortune Cookie and The Odd Couple, as well as later gems like Glengarry Glen Ross and Grumpy Old Men. And look into what I missed out!

He won two Emmys and was nominated for a Grammy and two Tonys, but he only stepped into the director’s chair once, for 1971’s Kotch, starring his old partner, Walter Matthau.

Yet his publicist remembered that he lived in constant terror of not landing another role. Of course, he kept landing them until he died in 2001, his final role only a year earlier.