The Politics of Melodrama

MISSING Directed by Costa-Gavras

Screenplay by Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart

TRAGEDY OF A RIDICULOUS MAN

Directed and Written by Bernardo Bertolucci

The argument goes like this: every movie is propaganda. Every character is a walking placard—for capitalism or idealism or monogamy or the status quo. Every shot, by its placement and rhythm and duration, is one more Pavlovian command to the viewer. A narrative movie is usually successful to the extent that it obscures these facts, transforms the thesis into entertainment and the placards into persuasive semblances of human beings.

In Z and State of Siege, Costa-Gavras turned politics into melodrama; he propelled the Good Leftists and the Bad Rightists into collision so headlong that the moviegoer had little time to ponder the ideology. In The Conformist and 1900, Bernardo Bertolucci turned politics into opera; anyone susceptible to visual grandeur could be swept away by the characters' emotional arias and the camera's delirious glissandos. Now each has made a film about political kidnaping in a turbulent country—Chile in Missing, Italy in Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man—and has approached the subject at a more measured pace. Without the stylistic filigrees, one can undistractedly sift for political meaning. The effect is like curling up late at night with the latest report from Amnesty International: you may have nightmares, but first you will fall asleep.

Charles Herman was a Harvard-educated journalist, writing for The Nation and public TV. In 1972 he and his wife arrived in Chile, and, 15 months later, during the bloody coup that deposed Salvador Allende, he disappeared. In outline, Charles looks like a modern, minor John Reed. But Missing is not his story. Instead, it tracks the attempts of Charles' wife (Sissy Spacek) and father (Jack Lemmon) to discover whether the young man is indeed missing or dead—killed by the junta for crimes unknown.

The trail leads Ed and Beth Herman—at first abrasive adversaries, then trusting amateur detectives—through the blood-streaked boulevards of Santiago and into the American embassy's labyrinth of red-white-and-blue tape. There they confront the anesthetizing smile of Nixonian bureaucracy. It is also the place where the movie begins lumbering to a halt, elaborating the obvious with political ironies that stick their thumb in the viewer's eye. A story that could have made for a brisk jeremiad on 60 Minutes is stretched to 122 minutes of heroes fuming and villains purring their oleaginous apologies. Spacek and Lemmon, an appealing sweet-and-sour combo, sink in the swamp of good intentions. Perhaps Costa-Gavras should jump back on the locomotive of melodrama. When he stands still, he builds prefab tract houses.