High Anxiety

By RICHARD CORLISS

WITHOUT A TRACE Directed by Stanley R. Jaffe Screenplay by Beth Gutcheon

Some tabloid headlines find the most vulnerable part of the civilized soul.

MISSING FLORIDA BOY FOUND DEAD AFTER LONG SEARCH. CALIFORNIA MAN SURRENDERS KIDNAPED BOY AFTER 7 YEARS. The tragedy of the kidnaped child is society's meanest joke on the fussy optimism of parents. Without a Trace, loosely based on the disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz from a SoHo street in 1979, is an earnest, fatally muddled attempt to dramatize this dilemma. A boy is missing; his mother (Kate Nelligan) and father (David Dukes) wait and wait, not daring to despair; a sympathetic detective (Judd Hirsch) trudges after tantalizing leads; a kind of life goes on.

Kate Nelligan portrays Susan as a superior woman locked in the palace tower of her awful loneliness. Her performance is a little essay on exalted anxiety: allowing her suppressed anger to explode in a girlish squeal, semaphoring fear in a flash of the eyes, ragging her estranged husband for not feeling pain as exquisitely as she does. But there are some moments no one could bring to life. Who could infuse dramatic tension into the leisurely reading of a newspaper? What actress could bring off that old Oscar-cadging ploy, the sudden quiet hysterics in a bubble bath?

To dramatize compellingly the parents' response to a kidnaping demands more cinematic ingenuity than is shown here. For all its good intentions, Without a Trace exploits a subject it means to understand, and, by its bathetic end, becomes what it means to denounce: a species of liberal kiddie porn. &

#151;By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.