The Missing Person

The Missing Person

95 Minutes








If film noir was an aesthetic response of sorts, a sense and sensibility that emerged from the difficulties of the Great Depression and the two World Wars, then its relatively limited original lifespan is not as much a surprise as it is a disappointment; maybe more than any other idiomatic mode, noir is almost pure pleasure, the distillation of humanity's worst traits transformed into entertainment - a pitch-black celebration of dread and cruelty set in a magical, malevolent night world full of cool and beautiful people. In the face of their general air of hopelessness, the unbound aesthetic joy of these films saves them from despair. As a filmmaker, how could you not want to tread this territory? How could you not want to explore your own corner of these sordid nightmare landscapes? Any time this goal is pursued and the attempt to replicate noir's unique, and chronologically distinct, alchemy is undertaken, the inevitable impulse to evaluate and place it within the form's traditional scope follows - how indebted to genre tropes is the work; how much of a pastiche has modern noir become? The Missing Person is a film that both engages and evades these questions; it is both a genre exercise and a new thing, even if in the end it is not fully either.

Michael Shannon plays John Rosow, a Chicago-based private detective leading the kind of listless, isolated life PIs are wont to have in these sorts of films. We open with a fun play on genre conventions that establishes both his similarity and circumstantial opposition to the sort of character he is meant to evoke: he lies in bed, drinking in the dark, the phone rings and he reaches for the nightstand, knocking the receiver off his rotary; the ringing, digital, persists. Whether he is of his time or not is the initial question that comes to mind, but through the magic of elliptical, half-flashback/half-dreamy hallucination sequences, we start to realize that maybe the real question is, how did he get lost? As the movie reveals more and more, it grows increasingly clear that Rosow is not a Long Goodbye-esque Rip Van Marlowe, a classic noir archetype transplanted into the present, but rather that he took on this new persona and quit the NYC police force after his wife/girlfriend was killed in the World Trade Center bombings. As his past reveals itself to us, flaking away his external persona, he begins to figure out that the mark he's been hired to follow is himself a man who chose to disappear in the wake of 9/11, presumed dead in the attacks.

If noir was the result of its surrounding historic context, a diagnosable symptom, it is interesting to see a film explicitly try to play with it as a stand-alone condition, emerging from another sociopolitical ailment altogether, rather than out of the sense of cinephilic devotion that motivates many other neo-noirs. The term neo-noir almost doesn't apply to The Missing Person, though, and that's where its external self starts to flake away a bit, too - each reference to its noir heart is so overwhelmingly rooted in classic scenarios and character types that it's something of a period piece contained within a modern film, a few people anachronistically speaking classic hardboiled dialogue within environments that no longer accommodate that sort of talk. At best, these moments are acceptable and at worst they're entirely unbelievable, further undermined by the fact that Rosow comfortably switches modes to a more contemporary vernacular and demeanor many times throughout the film while others (an unfortunate stab at the femme fatale, especially) are unwavering and unconvincing in their positioning. Maybe a Rip Van Marlowe approach would have better served the film after all; some people are displaced and some are not, and this classical wash that falls over the film undermines that clarity considerably. The Missing Person's pleasures as a visual experience and its structural conception are its greatest virtues, but in its final execution it falls short of its potential.

by Andrei Alupului