Waiting to exhale

When harried Wisconsin photographer Beth Cappadora (Pfeiffer) momentarily leaves her kids unattended in the Chicago hotel where she's attending her 15th high-school reunion, we know exactly what's coming. But as the Greeks knew, sometimes dramatic tension arises from our powerlessness before events we can foresee all too well. Three-year-old Ben has vanished without a trace while Beth's back was turned, and the cheerful maelstrom of the hotel lobby spirals sickeningly into agitated concern, then panic, and finally the empty, hopeless torpor of dealing with the authorities in the wake of irreversible tragedy. Pfeiffer can't do anything about her remarkable bone structure, but with damaged hair, pink eye shadow and a shapeless, flowered skirt, she comes about as close as she can to looking like an ordinary middle-American mom in these early scenes. As the enormous manhunt organized by Detective Candy Bliss (Whoopi Goldberg, displaying her usual blend of grit and good cheer) fritters away into nothingness, Beth settles into herself as a hollow-eyed, miserable specter, veins throbbing in her temples, unwilling to abandon her cocoon of grief and guilt. Setting his granite jaw against the winds of ill fortune, her restaurateur husband, Pat (Williams), drags her out of bed and forces her to at least feign attention to 7-year-old Vincent and infant daughter Kerry. If the stoic, inwardly seething husband and the tormented, self-absorbed wife are contemporary stock characters, they have rarely been so fully realized. Perhaps this movie's secret is that Grosbard is less interested in the single act of extraordinary violence done to this family than in its daily rhythms of ordinary violence: When Vincent comes home from school to find Beth still in bed, for example, he gives his squalling baby sister her bottle before calmly knocking an antique vase off its shelf to smash on the floor. Nine years later, after the Cappadoras move from Madison to Chicago and, at least superficially, adjust to the rhythms of life without Ben, a neighborhood kid named Sam rings the doorbell to see if they want their lawn mowed. (I'm not telling you anything the producers don't want you to know.) Beth's immediate suspicions are confirmed when Detective Bliss determines that this boy, who lives with a gentle adoptive father named George (John Kapelos, in a role of understated dignity), is in fact their missing son. As mysterious and implausible as this development is, Grosbard and Schiff pull it off, because their story is less about the facts of the case than the emotional torque they exert on the family. Both believing they have been granted a miraculous reprieve from their years of loss and pain, Pat and Beth gradually discover that the damage they've done to their marriage and to Vincent, now a laconic teenager (Jonathan Jackson of television's "General Hospital") can't be so easily undone. Although Ryan Merriman is likable enough as the rediscovered 12-year-old Ben/Sam -- and his strained, exploratory relationship with Vincent provides one of the film's most appealing threads -- he can't quite conquer a thankless role that demands him to change almost overnight from a displaced, homesick child to an overly articulate mini-adult capable of solving everyone's problems. Pat and Beth come to realize that this kid they've brought into their home bears almost no relationship to their idealized missing toddler, that in fact he is a stranger they may never know. You could say all parents must face a less dramatic version of this dilemma, when they finally notice that their children are no longer outgrowths of themselves. It's on this almost subconscious level, and in its painstaking artistry -- rather than the tacked-on tidiness of its resolution -- that "The Deep End of the Ocean" brushes closest to emotional truth.

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