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THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN is an intriguing new take on several eternal themes in literature. One is mother love, another is the returned captive. In this gripping adaptation of the Jacqueline Mitchard novel, a young suburban matron (Michelle Pfeiffer) loses her three year old son in a crowded Chicago hotel lobby. Nine years later he’s discovered living a few blocks away, and the struggle begins to rebuild the family.
No easy happy resolutions are possible in this nightmarish case of nature vs. nurture, no matter how intense the love of the Italian-American Catholic parents. The boy has goodwill toward them but no memory of them. He is deeply attached to the Greek-American culture and father who innocently raised him. (It resembles cases of switched babies, or of children historically captured in raids or wars, as in John Ford’s classic The Searchers, in which the child is taken by Indians.)
Veteran director Ulu Grosbard’s last film was the much-praised Georgia (1995), and he also made True Confessions, one of the better Catholic movies of the 1980’s. In this film he captures the essence of the dilemma in a moving welcome-home scene: The boy asks if he can do a Greek, rather than Italian, dance.
Audiences may be dissatisfied with the overly neat plot resolution. But the family dynamics are unnervingly true, and the complexity is adult and honest. It’s a conflict without villains, in which all the afflicted characters (including the sadly neglected older son, played with great teenage angst by Jonathan Jackson) are sympathetic.
This devoted mom will go down as one of Pfeiffer’s signature roles, with dramatic challenges all over the place, including the growing hysteria as the child is lost, the long months of depression, the panicked mix of hope and disbelief as she recognizes him years later, the desperate arguments with her husband (superbly played by Treat Williams) over what to do, the ultimate hard decisions and reconciliations.
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