Single mother Christine Collins comes home from work one day in the spring of 1931 to find her house empty and her little boy Walter vanished. The ensuing search yields nothing, the case is taken up by the press, continuing a trend of bad PR for the apparently ineffective LAPD. Then, months later, a boy abandoned in a truck stop in Indiana is identified as Walter. He’s scrubbed up and rushed back to Los Angeles and the arms of his long-suffering mother. But when the boy gets off the train, as the press snaps the celebratory photos, Christine tells Captain Jones, head of LAPD’s juvenile investigation unit, that they found the wrong boy. Jones tells her to take a second look, maybe the boy’s changed, maybe, he implies, Christine’s not quite right in the head, a side effect of so much worry and dread. Christine takes the boy home, is no more convinced than before, but LAPD, it seems, will have none of it. Case closed.
The set-up, verging on the surreal, is so wonderfully mysterious, yet something seems off. The wrong things are emphasized. Clues are conspicuously dropped. The misleadingly titled Changeling begins with Christine promising to follow a distinguished line of memorable movie characters—Simone Simon in Cat People, Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, Nicole Kidman in Birth, the entire cast of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—immersed in some tale of deep unease where no one will listen to reason and the condescending patriarchy bear down with the weight of our readiness to dismiss yet another hysterical woman. But this story, scripted by TV veteran J. Michael Straczynski, directed by Clint Eastwood, and starring that famed mother of five (and counting) Angelina Jolie, has another agenda altogether, one that will render Christine far less intriguing and far more akin to Erik Brokovich than to the heroine of any brooding tale of paranoia. It comes as a disappointment, but what can you do? It’s a true story.
So Christine becomes a crusader, and, while Jolie’s curls and big eyes look marvelous under a cloche, character development consequently evaporates in the heat of a great cause, namely, exposing levels of police corruption so appalling as to speculate collaboration with the worst criminals. The bad guys and really bad and the good guys really good, which is pretty hard to swallow when you’ve got one supremely pissed off John Malkovich playing the humourless pastor and radio personality who scoops Christine up in his flamboyant campaign to bring down LAPD. The history here is absolutely fascinating stuff and right up James Ellroy’s alley, involving a demented Canadian child killer, fiendish mental institutions trigger drunk with the EST treatments, death by hanging, and telephone operators on roller skates. But how to manage it all, how to bring out the movie in it? I’m not sure that Straczynski ever found a real focal point, or that Eastwood saw the meatier possibilities behind the script’s highly sellable mix of sordidness and triumph, Chinatown with a saintly protagonist and a happy ending. (Sort of.) Changeling is uneven, always essentially interesting, and terribly long. Some of the child performances are unspeakably bad. Most of the adults simply have only one note to play (to get an inkling of Jolie's, please see the accompanying photos, especially the first and last). It might have been much more, or, better yet, something completely different. Clint, 78 and on fire these days, is too busy to care much, I guess. Trailers for his next movie are already circulating. In fact I saw one pasted onto the top of Changeling.
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