“Kapò” and “The Missing Person” on DVD

The famously controversial "Kapò" and Michael Shannon neo-meta-noir "The Missing Person" come to DVD.

Ethics is also a ball to swat in Noah Buschel’s “The Missing Person,” insofar as this moody, toast-dry neo-meta-noir finds its MacGuffin in the reverbs from 9/11 — meta-spoiler, I guess — but the movie ends up defying every prejudice. It’s as if Buschel knew we’d be put off first by the noir cliches and then by the backstory, and played the movie so coolly, so mysteriously, with a slouch toward deadpan comedy that never coalesces into jokes, that the gambit works. The more you think about it after it’s through, the more poignant it becomes.

First and foremost, we get Michael Shannon, the moment’s crowned prince of off-kilter, as an anachronistic private dick wearily doing Bogartian shamus crap in a world in which he doesn’t own a computer, he reaches for his rotary-dial phone before his cell, and he can’t get a cab to legally follow another car. Shannon’s unwavering look of heartburn consternation all but carries this wispy indie, as the hero is hired to find a man in Mexico, and of course finds out so much more, a lot of it about himself.

Buschel doesn’t have a firm grip on his slippery idea — some stabs at comedy seem too easy (a pair of unorthodox undercover cops trail after Shannon’s dick only to swap sub-Tarantino-esque banter about trivial things), while others land gently (a passing patrolman on a Segway hits the right note). Dark, grainy and regularly lapsing into subjective montages, the film is so cagey about its program that it seems made up largely of disconcerting moods — a strangely silent, night-shadowed Mexican compound, ostensibly an orphanage but without children, seems as odd to Shannon’s grizzled protagonist as it does to us.

Eventually, the real scheme is revealed, and since Buschel doesn’t dramatize it, we’re left to piece it together, and use it to retrace the movie in our heads, at which point the movie is not a joke any longer, or a mystery, but simply a tragedy. But maybe all of those old Hammett-Chandler-Bogart detective films were tragedies, too, winding up with a heartful of rue and too many bodies. Maybe the genre isn’t quite through with us.

“Kapò” (Essential Art House – Criterion Collection) and “The Missing Person” (Strand) are now available on DVD.

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