Here is JB's review of THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN. It's quite the opposite of the previous positive review. This person didn't care for it at all. Though you must remember this is a Fall film, I believe, and there's quite a bit that they'll (the studio) can do to fix whatever problems (if any) there may be. There are spoilers in the review....
"DEEP END" SCRAPES THE BOTTOM
The new film "The Deep End of the Ocean" is a failed attempt at domestic drama in the "Ordinary People" vein. While it may be laudable to launch a film project free of gratuitous sex and violence, it would have been nice if the people behind "Deep End" had found something interesting to take their place. Sadly, they have not.
The film opens weakly with a sequence that depicts Beth Cappadora (Michelle Pfeiffer) as a "sloppy mother:" she forgets to make the sandwiches for a family trip, doesn't buckle one of her young sons into his safety seat, etc. These slip-ups are meant to prepare us for the fact that Beth ultimately leaves two of her young children unattended at a high school reunion, but what they actually do is make us lose all sympathy for a character who comes off not only as an incompetent mother but a complete idiot. When Beth soon learns that one of her young sons, Ben, has been kidnapped, she initially shows little recognizable human emotion, then finally explodes in a laughable display of hysteria, biting the hand of her husband, Pat (Treat Williams).
What follows is a drug-induced dream/fantasv sequence with ineptly executed special effects, in which Beth tries to save young Ben from drowning in the "Deep End of the Ocean." The point of this sequence, which has no stylistic or thematic relationship to the rest of the film, seems to be solely to justify the title of the film. They would have been better off cutting this embarrassing scene and just changing the damn title.
As the Cappadoras attempt to find their lost son, they are aided in their search by Whoopi Goldberg as Detective Candy Bliss. This sketchily drawn character is forced to deliver some extremely awkward lines about why she has such a silly name and about how it's tough being a detective when you're a woman, black and gay - yes, gay, as if that has anything to do with the story. The treatment of this character is representative of the low level of writing on this project. Minor characters are introduced, sometimes seemingly just to provide some boring piece of exposition, then forgotten for long stretches of screen time.
When the search for Ben proves fruitless. the film then charts the progress of the Cappadora family members as they deal with his extended absence. If you find catatonia interesting, you'll love watching scene after scene of Beth lying there like a lox in her bed. Of course the Cappadoras go through every predictable stage of grief, guilt, and reintegration into normal life, and you could write this part of the movie with a connect-the-dots book.
Finally, after a six year gap, the family relocates to Chicago, the site of the earlier high school reunion. The reasons for this move - something about starting a new restaurant - are so contrived that it can hardly be surprising when, two scenes later, they find their long lost son in their new neighborhood. If only Beth hadn't resisted the move (for equally contrived reasons), they could have found poor Ben about 8 years earlier! Anyway, it seems that Ben was kidnapped by one of Beth's high school classmates, a soap opera actress who lost her own son soon after giving birth. She later committed suicide, leaving Ben in the care of a man she had married subsequent to the kidnapping. Are you following this? It's all explained in some of the clunkiest expository passages ever recorded on film.
The rest of the film is devoted to how the Cappadoras and Ben, given the name Sam by his kidnapper, deal with their new life together. Of course, this process is made much easier by the fact that Ben is just about the most well adjusted kid you've ever seen. You see, despite the fact that the woman who kidnapped him - the woman he knew as his mother - committed suicide when he was about seven, he's still described by her husband as never having been "unhappy more than a day in his life." He is, as you may well guess, the kind of youngster only encountered in phony Hollywood entertainments.
Now the part of the film dealing with the restoration of the Cappadora family could have been very interesting, dealing as it does with issues of human individuality and identity. After all, Ben's situation is only an exaggerated version of what every adolescent goes through as he tries to assert his own sense of self in relation to his parents - parents who seek to impose their own values on their children. It could have been very interesting. Unfortunately, so much of the movie is given over to the creaky mechanics of the kidnapping plot, that little time is left to deal with these issues, which are dealt with in an extremely superficial way. Of course it all culminates with a feel-good happy ending, in which all the Cappadoras go on to live happily ever after.
One special point must be made about this film; while the director of this fiasco, Ulu Grosbard, is known for his work with actors, he shows surprisingly little ability in this area on this project. Of course, it's debatable whether Michelle Pfeiffer is even capable of the type of acting that could have given the character of Beth Cappadora the depth needed. The staging in general is amateurish, barely above the level of a student film.
All in all, "The Deep End of the Ocean" is abysmal. Don't get sucked in.
