Little girls lost

Two new films ask, have you checked the children?
By Cheryl Eddy

FREQUENT VIEWERS OF the Lifetime Movie Network know it, as do the producers of Nancy Grace's eponymous "debate" show: Barring the availability of a convenient serial killer (or killer storm), nothing draws viewers like missing children. Sure, war violence is scary, but kidnappings, which are seemingly more frequent and inevitable than ever, are in many ways far scarier. You can almost feel the parental paranoia spike with every new AMBER Alert.

In Flightplan Jodie Foster plays Kyle Pratt, a jacked-up Lifetime mom who faces not just stranger danger but also terrorism when her six-year-old daughter, Julia (Marlene Lawston), implausibly vanishes aboard a jumbo jet. The small family is traveling from Berlin to New York with a tragic mission: to bury Dad, whose coffin is loaded into the plane's belly as Julia solemnly watches. Director Robert Schwentke, working from a script by Billy Ray (Shattered Glass) and Peter A. Dowling, foreshadows gleefully, playing off travel fears in the manner of another recent in-flight thriller, Red Eye. Not only is there a group of Arab men aboard (who will later be harassed by a frantic Kyle, who declares she doesn't care about being politically incorrect), but the plane takes off amid icy, unsettling weather conditions. Above and beyond all that, Schwentke establishes a general air of danger that cloaks Kyle from the start – even the perky flight attendants strike subtly menacing poses.

When Julia goes missing, Kyle – a propulsion engineer who conveniently knows her way around the gigantic plane's every nook and cranny – goes ballistic, demanding the captain (Sean Bean) allow her free reign to search. He's willing to help, at least until the question of whether or not Julia was even aboard in the first place is raised (fortunately, nobody blames the aliens that snatched Julianne Moore's li'l darling in The Forgotten). A snippy air marshal (Peter Sarsgaard) and throngs of anxious passengers only make matters worse. Flightplan's reasonably tense first 80-odd minutes are compromised less by its expected twist than by its ridiculous epilogue, which tenders the ham-handed suggestion that we can all get along (despite a little "turbulence" along the way, of course).

There's no such uplift in writer-director Lodge Kerrigan's Keane, which also deals with a missing six-year-old girl, albeit in far less glamorous travel surroundings. Haunted by the loss of his daughter, Sophie, William Keane (Damian Lewis) lurks in the Port Authority bus terminal, asking passersby if they've seen her. Since she's been MIA for months, the rumpled, muttering Keane is ignored. "Someone took her right here in front of me," he insists as he paces, reliving the events of that terrible day. But Keane is a far less reliable protagonist than Kyle; while we're pretty certain that Julia is real (for one thing, we get a good look at her before she drops out of sight), Sophie goes unseen. He doesn't even have a photograph of her, or toys or clothes she left behind. At any rate, he's a shifty character, boozing and brawling his way through frames shot with awkward, shaky immediacy – a style choice influenced, no doubt, by exec producer Steven Soderbergh.

Keane grows more sympathetic when he befriends Lynn (Amy Ryan) and her daughter Kira (Abigail Breslin). He's particularly attracted to seven-year-old Kira; fortunately, this interest appears to come from a strictly fatherly place. Hardly a Kyle-like lioness, Lynn dumps the girl into Keane's care for a couple of days. Naturally, he's in heaven, taking Kira ice-skating, to McDonald's, and – most tellingly – to the bus terminal, where he's finally able to live out his fantasy of "finding" his lost daughter.

Keane ends on an ambiguous note, quite unlike Flightplan's expressway-to-your-heart finish that weirdly evokes Con Air (due perhaps to Sarsgaard's je ne sais Malkovich). But both films, one indie-raw, one Hollywood-slick, prey on a parent's most dreadful fears: not just of losing a child, but of the heart-wrenching guilt that such a loss leaves behind.

'Flightplan' is now playing in Bay Area theaters. 'Keane' opens Fri/30 at Opera Plaza Cinema, 601 Van Ness, SF, (415) 267-4893. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.