Michael Shannon has a face built for noir, but writer/director Noah Buschel doesn't exploit it well enough in "The Missing Person". The film's a neo-noir, but slack pacing, amateurish dialogue, unnecessary nods to 9/11 and a low budget hamper things.
Still, the overall arc of Bushchel's screenplay is very interesting. It stars Shannon as John Rosow, a hard-drinking, hard-boiled (is there any other?) private investigator who's tasked with trailing a man named John Fullmer. Here's the interesting part: Rosow learns that Fullmer has been both a "missing person" and presumed dead for many years. Though Rosow is tasked with "bringing in" Fullmer so that he may be reunited with his family, he opts against it. Better to let Fullmer live peacefully in his newly fabricated life. This reprieve echoes Rosow's own private demons, which he too must "let go of" if he hopes to "build a new life". The film suggests that Roscow's evocative of ancient noir gum-shoes precisely because he is always caught "out of time", locked into dwelling about a past that he can't let go of and so keeps on scarring.
The film contains several visual allusions to and recreations of Edward Hopper's "New York Movie", an oil-on-canvas painting from 1939. Why Hopper? Hopper's proved a huge influence on noir. His "Nighthawks" was cooked up after reading Ernest Hemingway's noirish "The Killers" (the filmed version of Hemingway's tale would later be influenced by Hopper's paintings), but even two decades before this, long before noir was even born, Hopper was churning out moody paintings evocative of early noirs. His 1921 etching "Night Shadows", for example, looks like an ahead-of-its-time high-angle shot from a Fritz Lang movie and his "House by the Railside" (and numerous early paintings of anonymous apartment blocks and motels) would prove a huge influence on Hitchcock's "Psycho". Walter Hill ("The Driver", "Hard Times") and Wim Wenders ("Hammet", "Paris Texas", "The American Friend", "The End of Violence") would openly consult Hopper's work when filming the aforementioned films.
So Bushchel's nod to Hopper is no surprise. What's surprising is his choice of "New York Movie". This particular painting consists of a movie usherette (blonde, bosomy; a typical noir gal) leaning against a cinema wall. The painting is then split roughly in half such that its left side is bathed in a darkness which offers only glimpses of audience members and a murky cinema screen, upon which escapist, idyllic rolling hills are projected. Meanwhile, the painting's right half serves as the usherette's own mind-space, well-lit, with passionate red curtains, lamps and a mysterious staircase suggestive of her "thoughts up there". Despite - as is traditional of Hopper - strong feelings of anonymity, loneliness, tranquillity and isolation, you sense a whirlpool of thoughts emanating from the usherette. Significantly, the painting is bisected by a phallic pillar, filled with swirling patterns evocative of nightmarish, half-coalesced thoughts. The pillar almost seems to signify the dividing point where fantasy is either (or bleeds into) projected and externalised (the cinema screen/object) or internalised/contemplated (usherette/subject). Rosow seems caught in a similar dilemma, brooding like the usherette instead of letting go like Hopper's eye-ball zapped audience.
The film's narrative is a loose retelling of "The Flitcraft Parable", a moment of digression in Dashiell Hammett's noir novel "The Maltest Falcon". One of literature's great digressions, the parable involves detective Sam Spade telling a girl the story of a middle class real estate agent called Flitcraft who, after nearly dying, has an existential epiphany. Flitcraft then decides to abandon his wife, kids, large income and perfect American family. "He went just like that," Spade says, "like a fist when you open your hand." The irony is that Spade then stumbles upon Flitcraft several years later living a "new life" almost identical to his "old one". Having wiped the slate clean, Flintcraft thus inadvertently rebuilt that which he was running away from. Men, Spade implies, adjust themselves to the world. Spade, however, adjusts the world to himself. This, of course, is a very Satrean, existential commitment. Bushchel's retelling of the parable doesn't go this far.
7.5/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Black Dahlia", "The Big Sleep" and "A Prairie Home Companion".
Still, the overall arc of Bushchel's screenplay is very interesting. It stars Shannon as John Rosow, a hard-drinking, hard-boiled (is there any other?) private investigator who's tasked with trailing a man named John Fullmer. Here's the interesting part: Rosow learns that Fullmer has been both a "missing person" and presumed dead for many years. Though Rosow is tasked with "bringing in" Fullmer so that he may be reunited with his family, he opts against it. Better to let Fullmer live peacefully in his newly fabricated life. This reprieve echoes Rosow's own private demons, which he too must "let go of" if he hopes to "build a new life". The film suggests that Roscow's evocative of ancient noir gum-shoes precisely because he is always caught "out of time", locked into dwelling about a past that he can't let go of and so keeps on scarring.
The film contains several visual allusions to and recreations of Edward Hopper's "New York Movie", an oil-on-canvas painting from 1939. Why Hopper? Hopper's proved a huge influence on noir. His "Nighthawks" was cooked up after reading Ernest Hemingway's noirish "The Killers" (the filmed version of Hemingway's tale would later be influenced by Hopper's paintings), but even two decades before this, long before noir was even born, Hopper was churning out moody paintings evocative of early noirs. His 1921 etching "Night Shadows", for example, looks like an ahead-of-its-time high-angle shot from a Fritz Lang movie and his "House by the Railside" (and numerous early paintings of anonymous apartment blocks and motels) would prove a huge influence on Hitchcock's "Psycho". Walter Hill ("The Driver", "Hard Times") and Wim Wenders ("Hammet", "Paris Texas", "The American Friend", "The End of Violence") would openly consult Hopper's work when filming the aforementioned films.
So Bushchel's nod to Hopper is no surprise. What's surprising is his choice of "New York Movie". This particular painting consists of a movie usherette (blonde, bosomy; a typical noir gal) leaning against a cinema wall. The painting is then split roughly in half such that its left side is bathed in a darkness which offers only glimpses of audience members and a murky cinema screen, upon which escapist, idyllic rolling hills are projected. Meanwhile, the painting's right half serves as the usherette's own mind-space, well-lit, with passionate red curtains, lamps and a mysterious staircase suggestive of her "thoughts up there". Despite - as is traditional of Hopper - strong feelings of anonymity, loneliness, tranquillity and isolation, you sense a whirlpool of thoughts emanating from the usherette. Significantly, the painting is bisected by a phallic pillar, filled with swirling patterns evocative of nightmarish, half-coalesced thoughts. The pillar almost seems to signify the dividing point where fantasy is either (or bleeds into) projected and externalised (the cinema screen/object) or internalised/contemplated (usherette/subject). Rosow seems caught in a similar dilemma, brooding like the usherette instead of letting go like Hopper's eye-ball zapped audience.
The film's narrative is a loose retelling of "The Flitcraft Parable", a moment of digression in Dashiell Hammett's noir novel "The Maltest Falcon". One of literature's great digressions, the parable involves detective Sam Spade telling a girl the story of a middle class real estate agent called Flitcraft who, after nearly dying, has an existential epiphany. Flitcraft then decides to abandon his wife, kids, large income and perfect American family. "He went just like that," Spade says, "like a fist when you open your hand." The irony is that Spade then stumbles upon Flitcraft several years later living a "new life" almost identical to his "old one". Having wiped the slate clean, Flintcraft thus inadvertently rebuilt that which he was running away from. Men, Spade implies, adjust themselves to the world. Spade, however, adjusts the world to himself. This, of course, is a very Satrean, existential commitment. Bushchel's retelling of the parable doesn't go this far.
7.5/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Black Dahlia", "The Big Sleep" and "A Prairie Home Companion".