Movies - The Deep End of the Ocean

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	Movies - The Deep End of the Ocean

The Deep End of the Ocean is a best-selling novel by Jacquelyn Mitchard, released in 1996 . It is about an American middle class, suburban family that is torn apart when the youngest son is kidnapped and raised by a mentally ill woman, until he appears at the frontdoor step of his real mother and asks if he can mow the lawn.

The novel was chosen as an Oprah Book Club® selection in September 1996 (ISBN 0451186923)

Film adaptation

Their is a 1999 film of the same name based on the novel. The film is rated PG-13 for some profanity, and drama.

Film Commentary

Wisconsin photographer and housewife Beth Cappadora (Michelle Pfeiffer) leaves her youngest son, named Ben alone with his older brother for a brief moment at a Chicago hotel, while attending her high school reunion. The oldest son lets go of his hand and Ben vanishes without a trace. Beth goes into an extended mental breakdown and it is left to her husband and owner of a restaurant Pat (Treat Williams) to force his wife to robotically care for their remaining two children; 7-year-old Vincent and infant daughter Kerry. Nine years pass, and the Cappadoras family is still together and have moved to Chicago and on the outside seems to have gotten over their grief. Yet, one day a young boy named Sam (Ryan Merriman) asks Beth if she needs the lawn mowed.

Beth suspects that this boy (who just happens to live with his father a two blocks away) is in fact her lost son, and while Ben mows the lawn, she takes photographs of him to show to her husband and teenager son (who says that he suspected all along). The parents contact Detective Candy Bliss (Whoopi Goldberg) who pops in to offer wise, albeit often cryptic and conflicting, advice to Beth. With very little detective work or discussion of the relevant legal issues, it is learned that at the college reunion in Chicago, the celebrity alumna Cecile Lockhart kidnapped Ben, raised Sam as her own child until she commits suicide, and left Sam to be raised by the sensitive and intellectual George Karras (John Kapelos).

There is subtle current in the film about ethnic conflict that is never fully developed. Ben was raised by a Greek-American father for nine years, while his biological parents are Italian-American. Ben is a polite and intellectual American boy who takes great pride in doing a Greek folk dance, much to the frustration of Pat who wants to pretend that Ben was never really abducted and thus can be the son that he wants him to be if only he uses enough discipline. Ben is faced with the ethnic identity that he grew up with, and the ethnic identity he would have known had he not been kidnapped. It would have made more sense to have had Ben raised by a Jewish family because it is difficult to accept how the Hollywoodized American ethnic differences between modern American Italians and Greeks explains the slight, but apparent, Archie Bunker reaction Pat gives to his son's attachment to Greek traditions. Granted, it is hard to accept the idea that a contemporary American boy (almost a teenager) would proudly lead a demonstration of a Greek dance at a public opening of his biological father's Italian restaurant. However, the films suggest, without really developing, the possible ethnic tensions that exist as part of the larger theme that finding Ben leads the family to learn that they are strangers to each other.

Aside from ethnicity, there is an underlined theme in the film about women's empowerment as Beth awakens from her nine year depression to argue with Pat about how to deal with Ben's dual-ethnic and family identity. Once Beth finds Ben she also finds her own inner strength, and argues with Pat about the terms that Ben must obey in order to become integrated into the family. Pat wants Ben to abandon what he thought was his name, ethnic identity, and his father. Beth wants her son to be happy and feels that forcing Ben to abandon the past nine years of his life will only drive him away, both physically and emotionally.

Vincent sees the presence of Ben as a symbol of his own guilt at allowing his younger brother to be kidnapped, and a symbol of the anger that he has built up over the past nine years in living with parents that were too caught up in their grief to give him the love and attention that he needed. His younger sister seems the most well-adjusted of the children, but that is because she was too young to remember Ben. Vincent and Pat filled in the role as parents when Beth was trapped in her depression.

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