Sam Karras, also known as Benjamin Cappadora, is one of the main characters in the 1999 film The Deep End of the Ocean, which bases on the best seller novel by the same title, written by the author Jacquelyn Mitchard.Sam was born to an american-italian family, as Benjamin Cappadora, to his father Pat Cappadora and mother Beth Cappadora. He also has an older brother, Vincent and a baby sister, Kerry. The family kept calling him simply 'Ben'. For three years he lead a happy life with his family, as an easy-going, well-behaved child.When Ben had just turned three years old, his mother went to her high school reunion in Chicago, taking all her three children with her. When they arrive at the hotel, where the reunion takes place, Beth finds out her best friend, Ellen, had paid for her stay at the hotel and Beth wants the billing changed to her own credit card. For some time she looks around with Ellen, spotting their old classmates and gossiping about them. They meet another friend, Jimmy, who'd become a detective. Beth and Ellen end up making fun of one of the other classmates, and while she was implying sex, Jimmy tells Ben and Vincent that she's talking about pizza. This causes Ben telling his mother that he wants pizza, but Beth dryly orders him to stay with his brother.Very shortly after this, as her friends whom she reunited with immediately after arriving, left with Kerry the baby, to park the car, she decides to go and fix her billing issue. She leaves the 7-year old Vincent at the crowded lobby, to look after Ben, while she pays the lady. It was supposed to take only a minute, but for some reason, it took much longer.When Beth returns to where she left her sons, she finds only Vincent, who tells her that Ben wouldn't let him hold his hand. Beth and Ellen start looking for Ben, but can not find him anywhere. Very soon Beth spots on the floor, a slice of pizza that has been mostly eaten. (But in the novel they don't spot anything at that point, and when they do, it's Ben's shoes which laces are nicely tied. Ben cannot do that himself, so it confirms it to be an abduction case, and the shoes aren't found by Beth but by the police.) In the movie, they don't find anything to confirm the nature of the case.A nation-wide search for Ben begins, but remains resultless, and it's implied that a crucial clue they received, was not investigated. Nine years go by and Ben is not found. After seven years, (in the novel, sooner), the Cappadoras move to Chicago. In the ninth year, the Cappadora's doorbell ring and Kerry opens the door to a 12-year old boy, who is looking for people whose grass he could mow to gain some pocket money. As Beth arrives at the door, the boy happens to be smiling, which causes Beth to get lost in the moment. She had a deep feeling - a mother's instinct - that this child may be her long lost son. They wish for the boy to mow their grass and he runs off to get a mower, telling Beth that he lives couple of blocks away. Kerry, who goes to the same school with the boy, tells her that his name is Sam. Sam comes back with the mower, and the hopeful Beth stands at the window, taking pictures of him as he works - telling him that she's taking pictures of leaves, that it's her job to take pictures.The photos are developed and soon enough the case is being looked into. Beth finds out Vincent had first seen Sam long ago, right around the time they'd moved there, and noticed that he looked like Ben. According to Vincent, he'd never really thought about it much, and hadn't mentioned it to his parents because he didn't believe that they'd have listened, or even heard him, if he told them he had found his long lost brother down the street. After Sam's fingerprints match with Ben's, Sam is taken into a foster care. George Karras, the man who the boy lived with and thought of as his father, is being accused of the kidnapping. It turns out that Karras had only adopted Ben, years ago, shortly after marrying, unaware of that the boy isn't his wife's son. The wife, who also was the kidnapper, had committed suicide five years ago. (In the novel, it wasn't a suicide, but she'd been institutionalized into a psychiatric hospital, where she remained at the point of Ben being discovered.)It is revealed that in the beginning of the investigation, the detective Bliss, who had befriended the Cappadora family during the years, had interviewed the kidnapper and even peaked at the sleeping Benjamin from a doorway, genuinely believing the boy was her own 4-year old son, as Ben was big for his age. And also, that Ben could've been found 4 years earlier than he was, if only some FBI worker hadn't failed to take the fingerprints out of Ben's shoe. For the kidnapper had a criminal past.George Karras has to give up his parental rights of the boy, and soon Sam is out of the foster care and lives with his biological family. This doesn't go too well, because he doesn't know who they are, he doesn't remember them - and he had also been lucky. His kidnapper had really thought that he was her own child, while he'd grown to believe she was his mother, and she and George had always treated him good, and loved him. He'd grown up a happy and healthy young boy, leading a normal, happy life - completely unaware of his true identity and family. Thus, now he bagan to suffer an identity crisis, as well as that of being seperated from the only Dad he could remember and whom he dearly loved.For three months he tries to cope and deal with the situation, to get to know the Cappadoras and respect and appreciate their feelings and efforts. But every so often he sneaks out at night and back to his old bed. One morning George returns the boy himself, and Sam's crisis is fully revealed to everyone. Beth had discussed some of it with him earlier, asking him what he wants. Shortly afterward, Beth and Pat discuss what to do, and disagree. Pat wants Beth to continue being a mother to Sam and help him get through it, but Beth wants to give Sam back to George, as it seemed to be what would make her son happy again. And soon enough, she does, but when the door closes behind Sam and George, she breaks into desperate, bitter crying. Pat and Beth's relationship suffers greatly, and very soon, the 16 years old Vincent, who hadn't been getting along with anyone during Sam's stay, almost gets himself killed by drunk driving. He spends the weekend in a lock-up, where Sam visits him.There he tells Vincent that he'd remembered something when he'd lived in their house. Beth had been showing him their old baby clothes and stuff from an old trunk, and he'd remembered the smell, from being inside the trunk. The morning of the day he disappeared, the brothers had been playing hide and seek, and Ben had been hiding in that trunk. He wanted to know if that memory had really happened. Vincent told him that it had - that Ben had let the lid shut on him and got caught. That Ben had just been there, not scared or anything. Sam told him that that's what he'd remembered; not being scared. Because he'd known that Vincent would come and find him.A few weeks later, in the middle of the night, Sam comes to their house and alarms only Vincent, wanting him to play basketball with him. The brothers play a quick game, until Vincent tries to send him back and come again the next day, and Sam reveals he's not going back. He came in means to stay for good - even making efforts to call George by his name instead of Dad. As the brothers drag Sam's heavy trunk of belongings into the house, Vincent reaveals a secret: I was the one. I let go of your hand. Sam carelessly ignores this, causing Vincent repeat in disbelief: Did you hear what I said? I let go of your hand, Sam. I told you to get lost. That's what I said: 'Get lost'! Sam genuinely dismisses this, by stating: So what? Gees, everybody says things like that! 'Get lost'. Big deal? , and then suggests another basketball game in means for the loser having to carry the heavy trunk into the house. In the film, Beth and Pat witness the discussion from inside the house, but not in the novel, which ends with the brothers trying to keep Ben's final homecoming a secret for the night.The story's title, the deep end of the ocean , is a meataphor for Ben's fate, strongly related to the boy's feelings and the mother-son relationship. The film has left out the scene that reveals this in the novel. The one, where, in the scene of the disappearence, Beth recalls a memory of herself and then 2-years old Ben, on the shore of an ocean:Ben was terribly afraid of water and refused to go into the ocean. The mother promised to hold on to Ben really tight - that she would never let the ocean get him. (But she did let the ocean take Ben, who disappeared because she was not careful enough.) Ben was especially scared of the deep end . He said that there are sharks in the deep end. (As in bad people, kidnappers.) He said that you can go to the deep end, and just keep walking in the bottom until the water is above your head, but then when you want to turn around and go back, you can't. You don't find there, because the water has washed away all the footprints. (Ben kept on walking in the ocean, as in, through life, in the deep water with the shark - the footptints being his memories of his true family, which he soon forgot, as he was so young. Lost all but one memory of his brother, which however grew faint and uncertain since that brother was no longer in his life or ever mentioned.)Beth also told him, on that day at the shore, that an ocean doesn't have a deep end. That there's always another shore on the other side. That's where Ben had been living after walking out of the deep water, and then - eventually reappeared into his rightful family's life. Show less «