Gone Astray

WATCHING STANLEY JAFFE'S Without A Trace is like watching a professor scrape a piece of chalk on the blackboard: you want to see what he's going to say, but the method gives you an uncontrollable urge to turn away and leave. In Without a Trace, Jaffe's style of filming and connecting the plot often deters from his poignant and broadly applicable theme.

"The picture was the star," said novice director Jaffe in an interview earlier this week. Because he wanted to create a unified piece about a family's changing reactions to their six-year-old son's inexplicable disappearance. Jaffe maintained, the acting, the setting and plot were important only as they contributed to the complete mood of the film."

Unfortunately, in his attempt to create this balance. Jaffe got entangled in detail. As a result, the movie drags and much of the impact of its frightening theme--the vulnerability of parents to the whims of crazies--is lost. This theme is carried through in its focus on Susan Selky (Kate Nelligan) and her reactions to the mysterious vanishing of her son. But it often gets watered down by the overabundance of minor actions more appropriate to a documentary than a movie of this kind.

Jaffe--who produced the Academy Award winning Kramer vs. Kramer, Goodbye Columbus, and Taps--said he was attracted by the human drama in Beth Gutcheon's adaptation of her novel Still Missing, based loosely on the real-life disappearance of Etan Patz. He added that he felt capable of directing this screenplay without worrying about his lack of acting experience because it was straightforward and unpretentious: A middle-class couple, very successful woman and her estranged husband are unexpectedly victimized by their son's disappearance. Instead of making a detective flick in which the main plot focused on the police investigation, and every clue fit into the larger mystery. Jaffe shows a series of seemingly unrelated scenes.

The movie traces Alex Selky's disappearance after his mother sends him off on his two-block walk to school. When he does not come home later that afternoon, the movie focuses on the mother's frantic attempt to discover his fate. The police's investigation of Alex's disappearance provides a loose framework for the rest of the film, as detective Al Manetti (Judd Hirsck) tries to maintain momentum despite the scarcity of clues. As time passes and the search deteriorate to the level of psychic and hypnotic investigation, clues begin to appear with a disturbing haphazardness; the mother's house-boy suddenly becomes a major suspect, and the details of his sordid past are suddenly added to the plot. The heavy burden placed on the audience's perspicuity to supply transitions and link them to Jaffe's theme make the film seem choppy and loosely woven.

IRONICALLY, although the film focuses on emotional reactions to Alex's disappearance--especially those of his mother and Manetti--Jaffe seems wary of showing actual emotion on the screen. Many scenes take place just before a character's emotional outburst or cut in just after; few actually reveal what's going on inside the character's head. Nelligan consistently underplays her anger and terror, adeptly portraying a woman who bottles everything up. But when she cracks, in a brutal verbal battle with her husband (David Dukes) in a restaurant. Jaffe seems to avert the camera, weakening the scene's impact.

Jaffe's emphasis on theme and structure led him to cast Nelligan and Hirsen rather than actors with more star appeal. Both excel in their roles: Nelligan, especially, works with such intelligence that she seems constrained by Jaffe's low-key interpretation. The tautness of her motions often reveals the depth of her characterization. When she visits her husband in the hospital, after he is beat up in the course of the investigation, her otherwise highly poised muscles relax as she tells him a terrible joke. That one moment evokes the despurate need for affection behind their irreparable estrangement. Susan reaches the breaking point late in the movie, in an explosive tirade against her best friend. In this scene, her seemingly insane refusal to admit that her son is dead reveals the fury of her subconscious struggle with reality.

As the film's hero, Hirsch plays Al Manetti, a New York City detective who is in charge of the Selky investigation. Hirsch thoroughly develops a fallible character who must balance his intuitive belief that the search is hopeless with his sympathetic determination to help Susan find her son. Playing off Nelligan's calm exterior Hirsch gradually gains a deep respect and affection for her courageous struggle to keep her son's image alive.

Jaffe's rambling plot steals from the potential of these performances. One scene often doesn't seem to follow another, and plot developments--such as the arrest of Susan's house boy--come without warning or apparent logic. Jaffe placed too much emphasis on the camera's ability to drain all meaning from a scene, without making enough effort to merge scenes and speed up the film's pace. His naive reliance on detail, rather than illuminating his subtle themes, merely gets in their way.