Screen:

...He is condescending when she tells him that her estranged husband Graham (David Dukes) is not behind their son's abduction...

...Searching for Alex becomes a way of life now, with cops traipsing in and out, false leads to follow and then, regretfully, abandon, lots of concerned friends to go through it all with you over and over...

...But once the sort of twist he represents has been manufactured for the story, we know that others, more insidious, will follow...

...Nor is it only her character that has gone hollow...

...She makes herself a cup of tea and reads the Times...

...Without a Trace asks us to ponder unanswerable questions, and then it gives us easy answers to them...

...Then it begins - the waiting, the anxiety, the terrible not knowing...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECk, JR.ESTERBECk, JR...

...With one of the cops who answers her first call concerning Alex, for instance, Susan makes small talk about what it must be like to work in Juvenile...

...She packs him off to school - a short walk from their Brooklyn Heights brownstone - and goes into the city to teach her courses at Columbia...

...and when she emerges from the bathroom, she can't even make it back to her own room without running into one of them...

...I felt a release, too, when she finally seeks some privacy in the bathtub and cries her eyes out...

...On the contrary, it's too humane...

...In the afternoon, she returns as usual...

...She even takes a lot of the blame for the screwing around he did that led to the break-up of their marriage...

...I'm on homicide...

...I know how you feel," he says in a patronizing tone at one point...

...During a lecture at Columbia that first day, before she knows Alex is missing, Susan tells her students about a benediction she once heard Robert Frost give: "Forgive me God the Tittle jokes I play on Thee,/and I'll forgive the great big one Thou play'st on me...

...To which Alex replies groggily, "He thinks he's my brother...

...Aggravation at having them underfoot flashes in her face, and again I felt better for her...

...The film begins by dwelling on the daily routine of Susan and Alex, and after the shock of his disappearance, the sheer entropy of life pulls it back into a routine again...

...Susan is an impressive woman...

...With this line, the chapter ends,leaving us with a little frisson of the sort in which mystery stories and thrillers specialize...

...The best scene is one where Menetti, six weeks after Alex disappears, finally has the special phone lines taken out of Susan's house and re-assigns the cops manning them to other, more recent cases...

...In doing so, she becomes almost too lucid and rational...

...Yet Gutcheon couldn't resist certain stylistic touches that are typical of policier fiction...

...But in a novel dealing with the most sentimental human relationship there is, one about the defenselessness of a mother where her child is concerned, crime-story melodrama seems to me a cheap shot at both the characters and the reader...

...She is such a steadfast, instinctive heroine that she is suddenly too good to be true...

...No amount of hysterical emotion could be as wrenching as seeing how attendance dwindles at meetings of the volunteers helping with the search...

...A close friend, someone who has been in and out of the house throughout the search, turns out to be a homosexual with a long history of sadism...

...At first Detective Menetti (Judd Hirsch) doesn't trust her...

...After she accuses Graham of having been a neglectful husband and father, she explains to a friend (Stockard Channing) what made her say such hurtful things to him...

...If you felt what I do, you'd be screaming...

...It is the author who is being cynical now...

...Bloody underwear of Alex's is found in his pocket the day he's arrested for a crime against another minor...

...She's lucid, tough-minded, determined to get her son back...

...His mother Susan (Kate Nelligan) awakens him with a question: "Why is there a dog sleeping on your bed...

...She's right, and we and Menetti both realize at the same time how unbearable her situation is, how remarkably she's behaving in it...

...She stifles her sobs so no one will hear them, the house being full of cops...

...She is having to learn to play a new tune...

...It is the little jokes, not the great big one, for which Stanley Jaffe shows a surprising feel as the producer-director of Without a Trace...

...Throughout this dismantling , Susan sits at the piano trying to pick out a piece she doesn't know very well yet...

...But I was glad to see her blow her stack at him, whether she was being unfair or not...

...It is the entire situation...

...The novel on which this movie is based is a sincere effort to portray how a woman would behave under such circumstances...

...The friend is, as she claims, not the guilty party...

...Alex is, like other boys, hard to keep moving in the morning...

...At last there is a break in the case...

...It's her finest moment...

...If we take that situation seriously in the first part of the film, we can't go away feeling good, as we're supposed to, at the end...

...It is not long until the case ends amidst a dozen wailing police sirens...

...She has so much insight and self-control, in fact, that we are relieved by those rare instances when she loses some of it...

...Beth Gutcheon, the author of both it and the script for the movie, is a friend of Etan Patz's mother and had her consent to write the-book...

...But he goes along with the larger, equally dishonest games being played by Gutcheon's plot as a whole...

...To Jaffe's credit, he eliminates some of these touches from his movie...

...The touches of genuine poignancy this movie has are in this routine...

...In the movie, he is Alex Selky (Daniel Bryan Corkill...

...What bothers me is not only the fact that the story of Etan Patz has never ended the way the movie does...

...You don't know," she tells him levelly...

...It's that the movie should put Susan in a desperate situation, and then resolve it with serendipity...

...I mean moments like that brief display of annoyance in the hall as Susan leaves the bathroom...

...Susan catches him at this last, but can't get angry with him...

...Such chills may be fun in the type of fiction where all human relationships are cynical and everyone has ulterior motives...

...Oh, I'm not on Juvenile," the cop says...

...Menetti quotes the statistics on how many fathers try to settle custody fights or get even with the ex-wives this way...

...There is such magnanimity and forbearance in it...

...Yet Susan somehow knows he's not the culprit...

...It's not that her usual calmness seems to lack human feeling...

...It is based on the story of a little boy named Etan Patz, who left for school one morning and vanished "without a trace...

...He drops his p.j.s where he stands, forgets to finish dressing because he starts playing with his "Merlin," feeds the egg he doesn't want to the dog...

...All those sirens in the final scene are only trying to drown the questions out...