'The Missing'

Relentless Sadness

Back in 2006, the McCanns lost their daughter Maddie in Portugal. In the weeks that followed was a terrible media circus, which reminded one of the Azaria Chamberlain case from August 1980 in the Northern Territory of Australia. Just as things happened in the Chamberlain case, bereft of clues and leads the Portuguese police moved to investigate the McCanns. It was predictable as it was misguided but not every police department on the planet got the memo about the dangers of crap police work and bad guessing.

The media for its part generated the sort of frenzy that - one can only guess - really pleases Rupert Murdoch with the hopes of selling lots of tabloid newspapers. In any case Maddie was never found and her case lingers as one of those high profile cases that flare up in the media from time to time. All of this goes to show that the things that have nothing to do with a missing person case can be just as brutal as the missing person case itself. The fishbowl life of being the focus of media is more than half the problem.

'The Missing' basically takes that dynamic and lets you live through the harrowing experience vicariously. As entertainment goes, it's rather difficult and challenging; perhaps even perverse in its desire to inflict you with the horror of being hounded by the media while trying to find out what happened to your child. In the process, the ironies abound. It's not for the faint of heart or the morally conscientious. What characterises the entire season is this sadness for the missing that is barely manageable. The unrelenting sadness is gruelling as it is insightful.

So, here's the spoiler alert as usual.

What's Good About It

It's a very compelling series to watch. The performances are great - especially the actors playing the French and Romanian characters. We know James Nesbitt very well and Frances O'Connor is solid a performer as you can hope for, but because we know them from other works, we tend to see the performer no matter what. While we recognise the other actors they and their performances imbue the whole series with theses of reality to carry the realism necessary. Tcheky Karyo, Emilie Dequenne and Said Taghmaoui put in fine performances to make the show work.

The characters are truly fucked up. There's no other word for it. Everybody central to the events has messed up inner lives and it all comes out. Nobody is innocent or without having made some transgression. If it's not outright guilt, it is character weaknesses that undermine these sad people in this sad drama. But it's a good kind of pessimism that draws out what makes the broken hearted carry on. That part of it is very interesting.

What's Bad About It

There are moments toward the end where the series falls in to a sort of generic crime show melodrama. In the early going, the show heads out to very challenging areas, but succumbs to a kind of pat story telling in order to wrap things up. Having worked so hard to establish a sense in which life is incomplete, jagged, mismatched and not at all perfect, the last episodes tie things up like a good little episode of Mrs. Marple. The hand is deft and the craft is solid, but for once it works entirely against the artistic vision established earlier.

Also a repetitive pattern begins to emerge where people who could offer clues refuse to help, need to be cajoled and coerced, but eventually live up to their better selves. It's part of the sense of completeness that betrays the initial successes of the episodes. It's as if the writers are leaning back on tried and tested tricks to get them through some parts that are not as well conceived.

What's Interesting About It

Like the very cerebral despair of the studied pessimism in 'True Detective' season 1, this series has a very visceral unquenchable yearning for all the people who go missing. Yet unlike 'True Detective, it never goes abstract, it always stays as a compulsion for the main character Tony Hughes who lives on hope of finding his son; but this hope has desiccated into a determination to ascertain what exactly happened to his son. The process of his hope drying out into this sinewy determination is what is explored on one side of the show. Ultimately the show closes with the very inability of Tony (and by extension us) to close the gap on the missing people. Their absence is a gaping blackhole the sucks up our emotional energy and being. This stands in contrast to the sudden transcendental realisation in 'True Detective'. Seen together, 'The Missing' delivers us to the front end of 'True Detective' at which end we reach a point of irrationality not so much to explain it, but to accept the cruel ironies of existence itself.

What Becomes Of The Distraught

The series taken as a whole can be topically retitled 'Fifty Shades of Grief'. Every nuance of the loss is worked out, investigated, prodded, interviewed, challenged and gone over with a fine tooth comb. The emotional landscape of the whole enterprise starts off with being aghast and simmers and boils in a soup made of guilt and blame and self-loathing. The known and unknowable gets a work out as ideas, but what the series is doggedly interested in is the feeling of this terrible loss which brings into focus various fears.

These fears include pedophilia rings, and organised criminal gangs from Eastern Europe, the illicit drug trade and freelance journalists with nary a qualm about destroying the lives of their subjects to make their own. Through all the emotional mayhem is this couple trying to make sense of the indecipherably awful emotions attached to the loss. The scrambled eggs of sadness and despair cannot be unscrambled back into an egg, and we are shown this over and over from so many angles.

The sense of loss is overwhelming and to a point, mind-warping. It even pushes a strange plot point through which you might not countenance in any other context. At that point the sadness becomes irredeemable. You certainly wouldn't want the McCanns to watch this series. It just might kill them.

Getting Away With Murder

It's a morbid thing, but in order for films, books, and TV shows to go somewhere radical, it has to posit the unacceptable as somehow reasonably explained. 'The Missing', daringly posits a situation where we can imagine ourselves committing a murder for exactly the same reasons as the character on screen. In other words, it cross our taboo and legal injunction against murder and presents a 'righteous' kill. Texts that venture to these places have to embrace a nihilism to countenance the murder, but also appeal to our sense of justice in order excuse the act. It's a tricky business.

Essentially, you have to imagine the worst crime possible and then be confronted with no option to access the law and its indifferent judgment. In Clint Eastwood's 'Unforgiven', this is done by showing the law itself as being a corrupt and dangerous liability to the community involved and so Will Munny shoots Little Bill - and the audience is there all the way with Clint Eastwood. It is the central, desperate act of that film. In 'The Missing', it comes somewhere in the middle and it is in many ways tangential to the action. When we get to the end we realise how arbitrary the murder was and it leaves avery bad taste.

Yet, the series does no drift into the kind of nihilism. Instead it involves society and family and the law at many turns. It's just that the individuals opt to ignore the law to let the murder go through. And  even if it is understandable, the fact that it is tangential makes the whole series a little odd. It's a little like you're making a movie about a coverup, and somewhere in the investigation you discover a ring of gang rapists. it is so sickening the searchers kill the gang rapists and bury the evidence, but the story goes on and the cover up is exposed to show something totally unrelated to the gang.

It has that kind of disjointed quality to it, and you remain disturbed by the murder.

Fearless Wrinkles

I'm going to be a little mean here. I'm not proud of it, but it was pretty glaring so, here goes...
The general thing about makeup for screen is that Hollywood is always smooth while UK dramas are deep in realism. The deeper the realism in the UK, the deeper the wrinkles get. The funnier and dumb-and-dumber a film gets in Hollywood, the smoother the skin tones. The realism is very deep in this film given the makeup we see. I'm really in awe of the fearless wrinkliness of both Nesbitt and O'Connor.  It's as if they just don't care, this is what humans look like in their late 40s. Except a craggy O'Connor looks a bit like what a female Joker might look like in a Batman movie.

Coincidentally I was watching 'Beneath The Planet Of The Apes' and was struck by how sweaty shine on the forehead is common place in early 1970s movies. It's the harsh key lights and the flat lighting to get an exposure on insensitive/slow film stock. I don't know when that shine became a taboo because you sure don't see it in the late 80s. So somewhere along the way, some makeup technology breakthrough took place together with advances film stock. And while there is no such sweaty shine on the face of the actors in this series, it sure seems like it was lit and made up for maximum wrinkles.

We grow old. It's a myth we get better looking with age as Hollywood keeps laying on the makeup. But when you se the blunt realism of skin blemishes and neurofibromatomas and warts and pimples and scars, you are so to taken aback by how artful the artlessness is made out to be.
The wrinkles add to the overall sadness as reminders of our mortality.