In 1885, New Mexico was still a territory. (When New Mexico had a Caucasian majority according to the 1910 census, Congress voted to admit New Mexico as a state in 1912.) Some Apaches, in league with American outlaws, were then abducting women and taking them to the border in order to sell them as white slaves to Mexicans. In The Missing, directed by Ron Howard, Magdalena Gilkeson (played by Cate Blanchett), the daughter of Samuel Jones (played by Tommy Lee Jones), lives with her two daughters, adolescent Lilly (played by Evan Rachel Wood) and ten-year-old Dot (played by Jenna Boyd). She has a farm, with chickens, goats, and cows; she earns some money by doctoring the sick. Her husband is dead, but she relies on ranchhand Brake Baldwin (played by Aaron Eckhart) by day; he is also her boyfriend by night. One day, Jones comes to visit, needing medical attention. Not happy to see him because he deserted his family some years ago, she nevertheless allows him to stay overnight in the barn and attends to his ailment in the morning. That morning he leaves, but so does Baldwin, accompanied by her two daughters; all go forth on horseback. When the daughters do not return by nightfall, she decides in the morning to search for them, only to discover that Baldwin is dead, Lilly has been abducted, the horses have been stolen, but at least Dot is alive. Maggie then decides to hunt for her missing daughter, but both the police of the nearby town and the local militia turn down her request to help her to track down her daughter. She instead enlists the aid of her father, who has lived with Chiricahua Apaches for years, and thus will be invaluable in retrieving Lilly. In due course, as the womanhunt runs into all sorts of difficulties, she forgives him for abandoning his family. However, the band of Apaches is sizable, and their are methods cruel, so the pursuit seems destined to end in tragedy, without a reunion of mother and daughter. The cinematography of New Mexican landscapes, mostly near Santa Fe, is breathtaking, even though the slow-moving trilingual story, based on Thomas Eidson's novel The Last Ride, is predictable. MH

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The Last Ride
by Tom Eidson

With families belonging to both the Apache and white civilizations, septuagenarian Samuel Jones is dying and wishes to be reunited with his one remaining daughter, Maggie, who is living in New Mexico Territory. Because Maggie's life has already been touched by the violence of earlier Apache raids, she wants nothing to do with the old shaman, whose mystical beliefs run counter to her Christian faith.