The Deep End of the Ocean
With Michelle Pfeiffer, Treat Williams, Jonathan Jackson, Ryan Merriman, Whoopi Goldberg, Cory Buck, John Kapelos, and Michael McElroy.
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Certainly one can rationalize this shift of gears. The late Dwight Macdonald–the film critic for Esquire back in the early 60s, when it was still possible to write for that magazine about movies as an art form rather than as a combination of sport and business–suggested in one of his columns that a shift of focus from one character to another is often a good thing. The occasion was a 1960 showing of William Wellman’s 1931 The Public Enemy, which Macdonald defined as “James Cagney’s picture,” adding, “Wellman uses Cagney with subtlety, keeping him in the background much of the time while secondary characters occupy the foreground….So it is all the more powerful when Cagney moves into the foreground at the big moments; our taste for this extraordinary actor has not been blunted by seeing too much of him.” It might be argued that this strategy is more attributable to Kubee Glasmon and John Bright’s script than to Wellman’s direction–a typical oversight in the auteurist 60s, even from an alleged antiauteurist. But wherever the shift in focus came from, Macdonald clearly had a point.
What’s tricky about The Deep End of the Ocean is that the central character and the character on whom most of the emotion is focused are different. The central character is a three-year-old boy named Ben (Michael McElroy) who gets kidnapped from the lobby of a Chicago hotel in 1988; nine years later his parents rediscover him quite by accident in their Madison, Wisconsin, neighborhood. But the story’s focus is Ben’s mother (Pfeiffer) and her grief, depression, and subsequent adjustment to the loss of her son during that nine-year period. When she finally happens upon her son, roughly halfway through the movie, the question of what happened to him nine years ago and how he understands that event naturally becomes the film’s most pressing issue. Yet it can’t be addressed or resolved in any but the most rudimentary fashion until the movie shifts its priorities, and this takes a fair amount of time.
