‘Deep End’ a Sea of Heartbreak

The bottomless dread of having a child disappear or die is a parent’s most consuming nightmare. Those who have experienced that kind of loss say that when it happens, your life takes a sharp turn and you sense at once that things are never going to get back to normal again.

For Beth Cappadora (Michelle Pfeiffer), that loss happens quite literally. In Chicago for her 15th high school reunion in “The Deep End of the Ocean’s” opening 1988 sequences, Beth momentarily leaves her 3-year-old middle child, Ben, in the charge of his 7-year-old brother, Vincent. When she returns, Ben is gone and no one, not even experienced police detective Candy Bliss (Whoopi Goldberg), can find him.

Taken from Jacquelyn Mitchard’s best-selling novel (the first selection of Oprah’s Book Club), “Deep End” takes a stab at telling both this wrenching tale and its surprising aftermath set nine years later.

Under Ulu Grosbard’s careful, measured direction, the film is ambitious to be a truly heartbreaking story. But though a lot of complex psychological issues about the nature of family are raised, “Deep End” ends up insisting on pat and overly tidy resolutions that are at variance with the emotional chaos it’s nominally attempting to convey.

Even the film’s partial success wouldn’t be possible without an exceptional performance by Pfeiffer, one of her best ever. The actress is that rare great beauty who is as empathetic as she is attractive, one who can convey pain, hysteria and misery and make us believe them.

Reaching into herself, Pfeiffer produces a scream of chilling agony when Beth finally acknowledges that her child is gone, and when someone tries to reassure her by saying they know how she feels, she answers with a devastating, “You don’t know, I don’t even know.” It’s a performance so strong and true that at times it seems as if it were intended for a different film.

Before Ben was lost--or so the glimpse we’re afforded of that life tells us--Beth was living in Madison, Wis., contentedly married to restaurateur Pat Cappadora (Treat Williams). She worked as a freelance photographer while taking care of her family, which included a new baby girl, but all of that, even her ability to care for her remaining children, is destroyed by her grief.

The depiction of the near-madness Beth descends into is the film’s most affecting section. Looking drawn and cadaverous, Pfeiffer brings a compelling desperation to the brittle, almost completely shattered Beth. Well-directed by the rigorously unsentimental Grosbard (“Straight Time,” “True Confessions”), the actress carries us with her even when her character is at its most driven, obsessive and unappealing.

But when we jump forward nine years, “Deep End” seems to run aground and lose focus. Unexpected developments flowing from a chance neighborhood encounter put the family’s troubles into a different perspective, and Beth and her entire family learn that having what you dream of is not always exactly what you’d wish for.

It’s difficult to pinpoint why “Deep End of the Ocean” is not as compelling in its second half. Partly there seems to be a retreat in Stephen Schiff’s underdeveloped script from the complete honesty, the willingness to embrace the messiness of life, that marked the first part of this film as well as Grosbard’s excellent last feature, “Georgia.”

While “Georgia” was an independently made film that in fact had difficulty finding distribution, “Deep End” is a studio project and that status seems to have naturally emphasized and heightened the schematic qualities of the book. Nothing too raw, nothing too unresolved, is allowed here, and while that makes the proceedings more palatable, it also robs them of a kind of intensity that the situation dealt with ought to have, the intensity that Pfeiffer’s performance lends it at critical junctures.

Also a drawback is a performance by Treat Williams as long-suffering husband Pat that never seems as sure of itself or as compelling as Pfeiffer’s. The only actor who comes close to matching her is, of all people, young Jonathan Jackson (a daytime TV Emmy winner for a recurring role on “General Hospital”), who plays Vincent at 17 with just the right touch of the unfathomable. It’s a performance that reminds us, as this film alternately does and does not, how perplexing and exasperating relationships between people who love each other can be.

* MPAA rating: PG-13 for language and thematic elements. Times guidelines: intense adult thematic material.

‘The Deep End of the Ocean’

Michelle Pfeiffer: Beth

Treat Williams: Pat

Whoopi Goldberg: Det. Candy Bliss

Jonathan Jackson: Vincent

Columbia Pictures and Mandalay Entertainment present a Via Rosa Production. Director Ulu Grosbard. Producers Kate Guinzberg, Steve Nicolaides. Executive producer Frank Capra III. Screenplay Stephen Schiff, based on the book by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Director of photography Stephen Goldblatt. Editor John Bloom. Costume designer Susie DeSanto. Music Elmer Bernstein. Production designer Dan Davis. Art director Bill Hiney. Set decorator Bill Cimino. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

In general release.