`The Deep End of the Ocean” — a movie about a child kidnapped, a mother in terror, a family nearly destroyed and two brothers reaching for each other through a fog of “might-have-beens” — is a tale that should move audiences as effortlessly as many were moved by the book on which it was based: Jacquelyn Mitchard’s 1996 Oprah Winfrey-approved bestseller.
But, for me at least, it doesn’t have that effect. And the problem may lie, partly, in the nightmarish power of “Deep End’s” central story. This film takes what must be a mother’s worse fear — the sudden disappearance of a young child — and gives it body and contour. As we watch, mother Beth Cappadora (Michelle Pfeiffer) looks away for a minute from her young child Ben (Michael McElroy) at a high school reunion in Chicago, leaving him with his older brother. And in that instant, the child is suddenly gone. Will he be found? Will he be the same? Can she ever forgive herself?
There’s something so primal about that story and the fears it taps that I wasn’t surprised to read that author Mitchard originally conceived it, whole and complete, in a dream. But there’s nothing really dreamlike about director Ulu Grosbard’s film. The movie, beginning with Ben’s annihilating disappearance, then charts the ravaging of the family: the way Beth falls apart, the way her husband, Pat (Treat Williams), pulls the clan together and older son Vincent grows from confused 7-year-old (Cory Buck) to a surly, delinquent 16 (Jonathan Jackson).
Finally, after the Cappadoras move from their original home in the college town of Madison, Wis., to big-city Chicago, the second act (actually the book’s third) begins — with the discovery of a neighbor boy, Sam ((Ryan Merriman), who is the image of vanished Ben as he might have grown.
Is this boy really Ben? And, if he is, what happened in all the years between? Since “Deep End of the Ocean” is, on some levels, a mystery (albeit one familiar to an ocean of readers), we’ll stay mum about what happens. The twists of the plot are one of the story’s main pleasures — though not the only one. The book is as much intimate family portrait as psychological thriller, a pop-narrative study of how a family deals with old wounds reopened and answered prayers that may be more painful than unanswered ones.
But movies don’t always preserve the essence, or even the surface, of the books they adapt, and this one is particularly short of the mark. Its intentions are good, but its heart is a little cool. The people who made “Deep End” — director Grosbard, writer Stephen Schiff, the producers, and star Pfeiffer — may all feel they’ve captured the book, compressed it where needed, made it breathe within different aesthetic boundaries. Yet they’ve lost too much of it — including the scene where the title itself is explained.
It’s not for want of trying or talent. Grosbard has sometimes been a master at intimate dramas. And this film has been mounted and cast with great care. Pfeiffer, portraying a flawed, frightened woman who reconstructs herself after a catastrophe, has some deeply touching moments, and so does Williams as Pat, a moral anchor who’s a bit too sure of himself.
But where the book eased you into a familiar-seeming Midwestern world, full of recognizable signposts but shattered by a nightmare, the movie has an almost abstract quality. It’s like a soap opera built out of theorems, a slide show of anguish. The book, despite its dreamlike flow, was hot, chatty. The movie is cool and calculated, overly stripped down. When Whoopi Goldberg as Candy Bliss, the Chicago cop investigating the disappearance, suddenly tells Beth that she’s a lesbian, it’s a revelation that leads nowhere. And when we discover what happened to Sam, there’s so little detail behind it, that the sheer illogic of the event strains the seams — as it didn’t, necessarily, in the book.
I’m in the unusual position of knowing both writers involved here: Mitchard is a Madison fellow journalist, and ex-Vanity Fair and New Yorker writer Schiff is a fellow film critic. Frankly, if I had to pick two writers whose styles and background seem unlikely to mesh, it might be these two. Mitchard is classically Midwestern: open-hearted, anecdotal, a wise-cracker. Schiff is classically East Coast: ironic, stylized, funny but a bit elitist.
Perhaps the producers felt that using Schiff, the writer of Adrian Lyne’s “Lolita,” would guard against sentimentality — just as Richard LaGravenese was able to staunch the gush of another bestseller-turned-movie “The Bridges of Madison County.” Mitchard’s novel wasn’t gushy, though. And the urbanity transfusion of Schiff’s script hasn’t helped. Instead, the story has lost its particularity. One senses both Madison and Chicago in the novel — but they’re largely absent from the film, however often Grosbard and company give us aerial shots of Madison’s tree-lined Capitol Square.
Nor is there much sense of how Midwestern families relate or talk to each other. The movie is crisp, clipped: a film about an Everyfamily, set in an Everycity — or in some clever Easterner’s high concept of the Heartland. But it lacks the book’s detail and its nightmarish flow, which now seems jagged, fractured, too hurried up and lacking humor.
Grosbard has worked primarily as a stage director, where he’s had a long and prestigious career, interspersed with some quality or ambitious films — especially “The Subject was Roses” (1968), “Straight Time” (1978) and his best movie, “Georgia” (1995). Grosbard is usually a straight psychological realist and social problem specialist, but maybe that’s not the best way to go with this material, which, at its best, suggests the emotional baldness of a 19th Century sentimental novel with the painstaking factuality of a true-life magazine story.
“The Deep End of the Ocean” should be real and nightmarish. It should take us deeper into the minds of Beth, Pat and Vincent. (The teenage Jackson actually gives the film’s most compelling performance.) Schiff’s script pares down the story far too much, and Grosbard and the actors aren’t able to build it back up.
This is a movie that should have worked on our emotions like a scalpel, made us cry and bleed. But, though it’s an affecting, polished film, it’s not satisfying: a nightmare that never achieves full intensity, a portrait of reality lost in big-movie limbo. Again, among the things lost in translation — besides large chunks of character and two cities — is the explanation for the title, “The Deep End of the Ocean.” Why? That’s the final, crucial disappearance.
”THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN”
(star) (star)
Directed by Ulu Grosbard; written by Stephen Schiff, based on the novel by Jacquelyn Mitchard; photographed by Stephen Goldblatt; edited by John Bloom; production designed by Dan Davis; music by Elmer Bernstein; produced by Kate Guinzberg, Steve Nicolaides. A Columbia Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:48. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Beth ………….. Michelle Pfeiffer
Pat …………… Treat Williams
Candy …………. Whoopi Goldberg
Vincent (16) …… Jonathan Jackson
Sam …………… Ryan Merriman
Vincent (7) ……. Cory Buck
