Word: nelligan
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...society's meanest joke on the fussy optimism of parents. Without a Trace, loosely based on the disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz from a SoHo street in 1979, is an earnest, fatally muddled attempt to dramatize this dilemma. A boy is missing; his mother (Kate Nelligan) and father (David Dukes) wait and wait, not daring to despair; a sympathetic detective (Judd Hirsch) trudges after tantalizing leads; a kind of life goes...
...Kate Nelligan portrays Susan as a superior woman locked in the palace tower of her awful loneliness. Her performance is a little essay on exalted anxiety: allowing her suppressed anger to explode in a girlish squeal, semaphoring fear in a flash of the eyes, ragging her estranged husband for not feeling pain as exquisitely as she does. But there are some moments no one could bring to life. Who could infuse dramatic tension into the leisurely reading of a newspaper? What actress could bring off that old Oscar-cadging ploy, the sudden quiet hysterics in a bubble bath...
...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...
...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...