{"id":4863,"date":"2009-11-22T23:10:55","date_gmt":"2009-11-23T03:10:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=4863"},"modified":"2019-04-15T18:56:21","modified_gmt":"2019-04-15T22:56:21","slug":"the-missing-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=4863","title":{"rendered":"The Missing Person"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>It\u2019s a shame that Hollywood is only interested in making origin films for the heroes of comic book films. Such is the case with the recent X-Men Origins: Wolverine<\/em>. Frankly, the heroes tend to be dull. And so, while there are some aberrations\u2014such as with Lexi Alexander\u2019s campy, silly, and ridiculously entertaining and colorful Punisher: War Zone<\/em><\/span><\/a>, which gave us an anti-hero to enjoy as he engaged in as much gratuitous carnage as possible\u2014it still contains an element of self-righteousness because Frank Castle believes he\u2019s doing the \u201cright\u201d thing. What would be preferable is if there were a protagonist as proudly disreputable as Watchmen<\/em>\u2019s<\/span><\/a> Rorschach, but as a lead instead of as a supporting player.<\/p>\n

\"missing_person2\"<\/a>A more ambitious idea would be to take the various villains from Dick Tracy<\/em>, surely more interesting than the straight-laced bore of the title character, and make a movie from their perspective. Noah Buschel\u2019s The Missing Person<\/em> plays like someone finally decided to do that. Its lead character, private investigator John Rosow, as played by Michael Shannon, is made up to look like a depressed and hung over mash-up of Dick Tracy enemies\u2019 Flat-Top and Influence, using the cadence and indecipherable speech patterns of Mumbles. And while The Missing Person<\/em> isn\u2019t a superhero movie\u2014it\u2019s somewhere between film noir and neo noir (it\u2019s a modern film, but Rosow has very little knowledge of current technology)\u2014it\u2019s preferable to find this conglomerate character in a hazy mystery plot as opposed to trying to take over the world.<\/p>\n

\"THe<\/a>Thankfully, Buschel doesn\u2019t drench The Missing Person<\/em> in in-jokes and self-awareness; just moody lighting and genre appropriate voiceover. In fact, The Missing Person<\/em>, which diverges in a number of unpredictable directions, is one of the very few noirs to justify its voiceover as more than a cheat and a framing device. It\u2019s actually emotionally necessary to the story. Usually, narration in a noir is supposed to guide us through the confusion that the main character is suffering through, providing the back story that the screenwriter was too lazy to fill in for us. But Buschel keeps us in the dark about Rosow\u2019s past (though it is eventually divulged in clunky third act scene of exposition*) and Rosow\u2019s given so little information about the case he\u2019s hired for that his discoveries arrive like begrudging realizations. Shannon plays Rosow like a thirsty lizard who is barely aware of his surroundings and unable to lie well enough to be good at his job. He thinks he\u2019s following a pedophile that kidnaps children and takes them to Mexico. But his burnt out clich\u00e9 of a persona is so harmless that even when he\u2019s caught by a murderous drug dealer, he\u2019s released with little more than a scratch.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>Shannon\u2019s performance is so<\/em> complete, he moves like The Elephant Man and enunciates like Mickey Rourke, that Buschel hardly has to fill in the periphery characters and their bemusement at the mere existence of Rosow. Character actors like Amy Ryan (who co-produced), Daniel Franzese, and John Ventimiglia drop in for an amusing scene and linger in the memory simply because they represent how we might respond to Rosow. Rosow\u2019s an eyesore, and when he flirts with lines like \u201cI\u2019m in the hide and seek business,\u201d it\u2019s perfectly believable that he wouldn\u2019t know he\u2019s being conned by a cell phone salesman or that glow-in-the-dark sunglasses won\u2019t work too well at night**.<\/p>\n

Rosow\u2019s bumbling, which verges on slapstick but thankfully never quite gets there, allows Buschel to play with the tone. Buschel drifts into David Lynch territory (especially Ryan Samul\u2019s striking, morose cinematography) without getting drowned in it. Buschel engages in various surrealist elements and fantasy scenes, but avoids Lynch\u2019s tendency to explore the duality of hipster suburbanites, where oldies and irony shop at the same mall.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>And yet with all of these floating distractions, Buschel successfully involves us emotionally, making us worry about the sadness of the circumstances instead of just the resolution***. It\u2019s rare that a crime film is so stirring that the complexities of the conclusion are secondary to how the characters actually feel about the situation (shades of Gone Baby Gone<\/em>, where Amy Ryan also had a supporting part). Such emotional attachment makes it quite a selfish wish that someone hire Shannon for the next reboot of The Punisher<\/em> franchise. All he needs to do to succeed is a grumble and a gun.<\/p>\n

* We even get a variation on the \u201cForget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown\u201d line, but it suggests a lot more trouble than Buschel is able to pay off about Rosow\u2019s past.<\/p>\n

** The sunglasses allow for a great variation on the condom joke in Blake Edwards\u2019 Skin Deep<\/em>.<\/p>\n

*** Which will remind some theatergoers of the central situation of Neil Labute\u2019s The Mercy Seat<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a shame that Hollywood is only interested in making origin films for the heroes of comic book films. Such is the case with the recent X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Frankly, the heroes tend to be dull. And so, while there are some aberrations\u2014such as with Lexi Alexander\u2019s campy, silly, and ridiculously entertaining and colorful Punisher: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[1361,5188,5997,5999,4815,1257,6011,6006,89,3198,786,795,6003,6009,3456,6002,6004,267,4359,6005,2859,1013,5996,36,4600,6008,2965,3796,5993,3458,5189,4401,4904,348,6012,5994,6000,5103,833,5998,6007,3055,6010,6001],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4863"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9330,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4863\/revisions\/9330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}