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Wow! Such a good movie.

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Alcoholic private investigator John Rosow (Michael Shannon) is hired by Miss Charley (Amy Ryan) to follow a man on a train from Chicago to Los Angeles. The man is traveling with a kid who turns out to be one of the missing presumed dead during 9/11. Rosow has suppose to him bring back to his wife. There are a couple of supposed FBI agents and a woman who sleeps with him but hiding an agenda.This is a meandering hard-boiled private eye story. Michael Shannon is good as this character. It's not terribly intense. There's only so much that Shannon can do with the material especially if he has to do it as a drunk for the whole movie. The style reminds me of some of the 70s attempt to revive the 50s noir. I like that style but the story needs a lot more tension.

Can't tell you how hard I tried to like "The Missing Person". Right off the bat, you can see it is an imitation noir, an attempt to recall a bygone era in movies, and they got a down-at-the-heels, alcoholic 'private eye' to be the hero - and being a likable sort, you root for him. The color is not splashy but almost a sepia, two-tone effect that works well with the mood of the picture.However.As noted by several reviewers, it takes forever to get going but then maintains the same slow, plodding pace throughout the film. And the hero, played by Michael Shannon, severely underplays his part and seems to be in a stupor in some scenes, so sluggish does he appear. That may be what the director was looking for, but he is at times in danger of fading into the wallpaper and losing command of what are essentially his scenes. Lastly, too much plot explanation was saved for the final scenes and became almost too much to absorb; It makes you wonder if you got the gist of the story.I hope this was a learning experience for director Buschel and I applaud his effort and concept. I hope he makes more and better pictures. And I hope he is not offended by the fact that a highlight of the movie for me was Thelonious Monk's version of an old standard, "I Don't Stand A Ghost Of A Chance", played over the final credits. It was perfection, a haunting rendition played slowly and using very few fingers.

Michael Shannon is one of the finest new character actors working in films today; his performance here as a private investigator from New York, hired to trail a middle-aged man from Chicago to Los Angeles by train, is the centerpiece of "The Missing Person"...and is very nearly the entire show. Writer-director Noah Buschel was probably hoping to modernize the old private eye clichés (including booze, broads, and blaring saxophones on the soundtrack), but his movie doesn't really start cooking for at least a quarter of an hour into the proceedings. Buschel's pacing is deliberately slow, and Shannon's John Rosow is intentionally beleaguered and burnt-out, yet there's no reason to be so poky with this narrative (even Bogie livened up earlier on one of his cases). The film is well-produced and shot, though it runs the risk of losing viewers before it starts to take shape. Once it does, it becomes a rather fascinating throwback, its scenario seesawing between the old and new--like Philip Marlowe in the cell-phone era. **1/2 from ****

The Missing Person is, on the surface, about an alcoholic ex-cop who's assigned to find the titular character and bring him home to his wife. But it's much more than that; it's a look at how the survivors of the September 11 attacks continued with their lives, post-tragedy, and it's about man's powers of self redemption. It's a character study in the guise of a film noir mystery.John Rosow, played by Michael Shannon, is contacted by a mysterious client to follow a man from Chicago to LA, find out what he's up to, and then bring him home to New York. But Rosow's investigation unearths more than a simple retrieval mission, and ultimately it reveals a heck of a lot about him and his past, particularly in how he has dealt with losing his wife during the 9/11 attacks.Because, you see - and you will, early on, no spoiler here - the missing person is one of the many who simply were never heard from again after the attacks on the Twin Towers. Many of those people were (and are) presumed dead, but some may have behaved like Harold Fullmer (Frank Wood) and moved elsewhere to get on with their lives anew. Harold's up to something, but luckily for us it's not something nefarious (that would have been too obvious, certainly), and soon Rosow is faced with a moral quandary - should he let Harold stay where he is, or is he obligated to bring him back east? Shannon is superb, a craggy, world-weary Johnny Law who's been leaning on the drink for far too long. We've seen these oversoaked cops before, the ones who are either cold-shocked by tragedy or just numbed to everyday horrors. But below the seen-it-all surface, Rosow has plenty of issues, plenty of bad memories, and plenty of guilt.Thus there are dovetailing plots - the apprehension of Fullmer and the redemption of Rosow. Writer Noah Buschel, who also directed, has crafted a rich, crusty mystery thriller into a psychological study of the long-term effects of a truly horrific day in American history, particularly on individuals; in this case, one man flees his memories, while the other embraces them nightly.I wanted to mention this movie in particular, because it's certainly not one that most people have heard of (it's now on DVD). It's a quiet, subtle look at an event that was itself nothing but. It's well written and insightful into the psyche of a survivor, and it includes a commanding performance by Shannon (nominated for an Oscar for Revolutionary Road, overshadowing both Kate Winslet and the overacting of Leonardo Dicaprio) along with strong support from Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone).