Ransom of the Heart

By RICHARD CORLISS

Life is a stern professor: It teaches us how to say goodbye. We lose--or simply misplace--our youth, many of our dreams, the bounce in our step, the dewy dependence of our children. We grow, then decay; our kids grow up and grow away. For most of us the process is so gradual that we take it for granted. We accommodate ourselves to loss, as a rehearsal for the ultimate accommodation of dying. But what if you have this good life--the sweet husband, the three kids--and then it disappears from under you, like a magic carpet yanked by a prankster? What if your three-year-old son were kidnapped?

That happens to Beth Cappadora (Michelle Pfeiffer) in The Deep End of the Ocean, adapted by Stephen Schiff from Jacquelyn Mitchard's novel. In a crowded hotel lobby, she leaves little Ben in the care of his seven-year-old brother for a few minutes, and when she returns he has wandered off--or fallen off the end of the earth. A kidnapping scenario has the makings of melodrama or piety, but this carefully complex movie, directed by Ulu Grosbard, finds urgency in more ambiguous family vectors.

Beth's husband Pat (Treat Williams) and remaining son Vincent (Cory Buck at seven, Jonathan Jackson at 16) dare to pretend that life goes on. But Beth makes a career of her guilt and grief; she builds a mausoleum for her lost child and moves into it. She sleeps all day and leaves the tending of her infant daughter to the two males in the house. In a nice vignette, young Vincent comes home, sees that his sister is being ignored, picks up her rattles and puts them in the playpen, then walks through the foyer, knocking over a vase that smashes on the floor as he passes. The heart's violence has rarely been dramatized with such telling nonchalance.

This is a ghost story where the ghost comes back to life. For Ben is found, nine years later, and his name is Sam. O.K., he's back--now what? For Sam (Ryan Merriman) was happy with the folks he thought were his parents. And now that he's back "home," getting bear-hugged by strangers, he wants to return to the loving man who adopted him; the boy feels he's been kidnapped twice. But really it's Beth who vanished, from herself and her family. She was the ghost, sleepwalking for years, reminding everyone that the odor of catastrophe can't be Lysoled away. Now she has her boy back. Can she give him away again?

Deep End may remind you of a "quality" TV play of the '50s: it is conscientious, delicately acted, lacking in visual flair. It is so generous to all the characters that it tends to meander. Now it's Beth's story, now Vincent's, now Sam's. It has little interest in villainy: the backstory of the kidnapping takes just moments. But in a time when there are few serious family dramas--and when those few, like Stepmom, play it shrill and sticky--the old limitations can look like cardinal virtues.

The entire cast does fine work, but Pfeiffer is a treasure. She calibrates each nuance of loss without seeming calculating. She makes Beth sensible and alive, as understandable as that nice woman next door whose sobs wake you in the night to remind you that we are all one vagrant step from heartbreak.

--By Richard Corliss