A swatch of TV-movie material given a big-screen sheen. Michelle Pfeiffer is cast as a Mother Discouraged whose three-year-old middle child disappears from the crowded lobby of the host hotel at her fifteen-year high-school reunion. Nine years later, after an unavailing nationwide search, a People Magazine cover story, and a change of residence from Wisconsin to Illinois, a prepubescent neighbor boy knocks on her front door looking for yardwork. She recognizes him at a glance as her missing son -- even though he is of necessity an altogether different actor. (He, on the other hand, does not recognize his mother, though she hasn't aged a day.) The coincidence is of a size that could not be gotten over with rope and grappling hook. It towers over, and blocks the path to, the tender feelings that plead for our attention as the storyline rolls obliviously onward. The explanation of the boy's abduction and the convenient exit of his abductor, covered in a couple of lines at the tea table, are shoddy plotting as well. Pfeiffer takes her acting very seriously, but scarcely more seriously than she takes her cosmetic surgery; and her Cobra Woman visage leaves her a long way short of a paradigm of maternal warmth. Approximately sixty degrees Fahrenheit short. Somewhere nearer the paradigm of ice water in the veins. With Treat Williams, Jonathan Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg; directed by Ulu Grosbard. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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