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Changeling

If Hollywood has a better all-around craftsman working now than Clint Eastwood, I can’t think of who it is. Apprenticed in the waning days of the big studios and the assembly-line days of 1960s television, Eastwood learned to value efficiency and craft. As he moved from acting in films to making them, it seemed as if he would never escape being pigeonholed as an action filmmaker. But he persevered, pushing the envelopes of the genre he was stuck in whenever he could. As he nears 80, well past retirement age for most professions, he has to his recent credit one of the strongest bodies of work of any American filmmaker: Unforgiven, Flags of Our Fathers, Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River, Letters from Iwo Jima.

Angelina Jolie & Jeffrey Donovan in Changeling.

Is Changeling of that rank? No. It’s a gripping and compelling movie, filled with unforgettable moments. I don’t know if anyone could have done a better job than Eastwood. But it’s a big story that encompasses too much history to be grasped in a single feature.

Changeling is based on a true story, and watching it spin out I made a note that will can probably be found in every reviewer’s notes on this movie, that if this weren’t a true story no one would ever believe it.

In 1928, Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a single mother living in Los Angeles, reported to the police that her nine-year-old son Walter was missing. Months later the police informed her that her son had been found halfway across the country. But the boy they returned to her was not Walter, though he claimed to be.

The first act of Changeling is a Kafka-esque horror story with traces of black comedy a la Catch-22. From the moment she sees this boy at the train station, Collins knows it is not her son. But the police are determined to make her accept their rescue, and bully her into taking him home. Marshalling incontrovertible facts—this boy is three inches too short and circumcised to boot—she returns to make her case. The police won’t back down, accusing her of wanting to shirk her duties as a mother. Arguing finally that she as a mother should know her own son, a hired doctor smugly tells her that as a mother she’s not able to be objective.

(I don’t know if the release date was chosen to coincide with the final frenzied days of the election season, but scenes of Jolie arguing with officials feeding her BS that they both know are bald-faced lies certainly reminded me of every evening newscast of the past few months.)

This being a true story and not a paranoid fantasy by Franz Kafka, however, there proves to be a reason for the LAPD’s preposterous claims. In the era of Prohibition, the force is hopelessly corrupt, though not unconcerned with their public image. Unwilling to let what they had hoped would be a public relations coup—an actual solved case!—turn into another black eye, they arrogantly try to silence Collins by committing her (sans any legal proceedings) to a psychiatric hospital where the women’s ward is filled with other “inconvenient” ladies.

For the middle third of Changeling, it looks as though the script has taken the case as a canny entry into the LAPD’s seemingly endless history of corruption. But there’s more: Walter’s actual fate, though unproved, seems to be involved with the third spoke of the film. That I will leave you to discover on your own, though I will say that the story is rich enough for another movie all by itself.

You can’t blame screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski, who discovered the records of the case in a pile of documents waiting to be burned in LA’s City Hall, for wanting to turn this into a script. And you can see the attraction to producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, who specialize in true-life stories (A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, American Gangster, the upcoming Frost/Nixon). In dramatic terms, it’s simply too much of a good thing. As is, the script already condenses or removes a number of interesting aspects of the case.

Like all of Eastwood’s films, Changeling looks terrific without being ostentatious. And as befits someone who started as an actor, he gets strong performances from a cast of mostly unfamiliar faces, especially Jason Butler Harner as Gordon Northcott, the central figure of the last section of the film.

What does put the film off balance is Jolie. It’s not that she isn’t a strong and capable actress; during the scenes in the mental institution, I was struck by how far she’s come since her overwrought turn in a similar setting in Girl, Interrupted. But the film is pitched too much to her as an emblem of sainted, suffering motherhood. With gothic makeup that amplifies the distinctive aspects of her visage to grotesque proportions—pale skin powdered to whiteness, the big lips exaggerated with bright lipstick, the eyes swollen with dark eye shadow—it’s a star turn in a part that needed a character actress to keep the story in balance. (As the preacher who helped bring her case to the public’s attention, John Malkovich makes so little impression that you wonder why they bothered casting him.)

Changeling is the first Eastwood film in awhile to be less than the sum of its parts. There are a few strikingly composed sequences, such as an execution near the end of the film, that seem to exist on their own merits more than what they bring to the movie as a whole. It’s far from a bad film, just a disappointment based on our expectations.


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