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Changeling

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Cert: 15

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Dir: Clint Eastwood. Cast: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Michael Kelly, Colm Feore, Amy Ryan, Jason Butler Harner

 

Description: Single mother Christine Collins works as a supervisor at the telephone exchange to keep a roof over the head of her nine-year-old son Walter. One weekend, Christine is unexpectedly called into work and when she returns home, Walter has disappeared without trace. After months of fearing the worst, Captain JJ Jones contacts Christine with incredible news: Walter has been found safe in a neighbouring state. The jubilant mother races to the train station to meet her son, except the boy who claims to be Walter is an impostor. With the press swarming, the mother is forced against her will to take in the boy as if he were her son.

Country: US. 2008. 141mins

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Changeling is the mother of all tragedies

 

Press gang: Captain J J Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) of the LAPD leads Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) through a scrum of reporters after she informs the police that her nine-year-old son has gone missing

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There is a moment in this true-crime thriller from Clint Eastwood where the heroine, played by Angelina Jolie, reveals her “pick” for Best Film at the Oscars. It’s 1935 and she’s backing It Happened One Night. The film did, of course, win and is now seen as a screwball classic, which makes both the heroine and that year’s judges look smart.

That Eastwood and his star are Oscar winners themselves, however, makes the in-joke a bit too cute. Hubris is fine. Complacency — particularly when attached to a project this patchy — is downright criminal.

There’s nothing wrong with Changeling’s subject matter. The story behind the film, dug up by scriptwriter and former journalist J Michael Straczynski, is a peach. The action, which takes place over several years, begins in 1928 when Christine Collins, a single mother living in a lower-middle-class district in LA, reports that her nine-year-old son, Walter, has gone missing. The notoriously corrupt and violent Los Angeles Police Department, led by Captain J J Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), barely lifts a finger to help, then suddenly foist another boy into her desperate arms. She knows it isn’t Walter. They do, too, but they want a feelgood story to keep the press off their backs, so advise her to take him for a “trial run”.

Clearly, for these men, something is better than nothing. They are astonished when Christine insists they keep up the search for her “real” son and are outraged when, with the help of a preacher (played by John Malkovich), she takes her story to the press. They accuse her of being a “derelict” mother, a floozy who wants to shirk her responsibilities.

Finally, they throw her into an asylum (thanks to something called Code 12, the LAPD could incarcerate powerless, generally female, inhabitants of the city without so much as a warrant).

Meanwhile, a lowly member of the force stumbles across an axe-strewn farm and a frightened boy. We’re about to meet the man who lured Walter away from his home — and a bruised, wrathful Christine is set to change history.

Jolie is at her best in the film’s opening section, which covers the short time when Christine has her beloved boy, yet because she’s juggling motherhood and work looks almost translucent with strain. Christine is a supervisor at a telephone company — she zooms around on roller-skates to ensure maximum efficiency — and her childlike, almost carefree agility spooks us. This woman is so overstretched it’s as if she’s not all there.

Jolie wants us to see that Christine finds life overwhelming even before her nightmare begins. Yet all too soon such cross-currents slip away. The focus shifts to Christine’s battle with the LAPD and Jolie, basically required to say, “Keep looking for my real son!” ad infinitum, turns frantic.

With nothing to sink her teeth into, she takes chunks out of the scenery instead. Her gaunt hands get fluttery, her melodious voice keeps breaking. The more Jolie tries to involve us, the more detached we feel.

Her Amazonian beauty usually works with the script but not here. The camera is glued to her troubled face and while we’re supposed to marvel at her unquenchable spirit, what we really think is: nice pout! Her wardrobe doesn’t help either; resplendent in a succession of floaty, classically elegant outfits, Jolie looks at all times like a film star (photos from the time suggest Collins wanted to look like a movie star, which is quite different).

We associate Eastwood the director with spareness but that’s only half the story. He’s a man drawn to downbeat tales with unhappy endings set in landscapes parched of pleasure. But he’s also given to stateliness, unhurried shots, immaculate period details — epics with a capital E. Sometimes the grimness and grandeur gel; sometimes they just add up to pompous soaps.

An unreal air circulates in Changeling. In the madhouse, Christine meets a tart with a heart (Amy Ryan, sporting a wet-look perm), who teaches her the importance of talking tough. When the doctor asks Christine to sign a letter saying her son has been found, she looks him in the eye and says: “F**k you and the horse you rode in on!”
There is a crudeness at work here that has nothing to do with bad language and everything to do with Eastwood’s love of cowboy clichés. Christine can’t just defeat the bad guys. She has to out-quip them.

Some things about Changeling’s long second half are intriguing. The child actors, notably Gattlin Griffith as Walter, are superb, their performances perfectly in sync with one of the script’s more subtle themes — that home is not necessarily where the heart is.

But Christine herself is pressed into the Hollywood mould and becomes indistinguishable from the other feisty giant-killers of recent years. She’s Erin Brockovich without the padded bra.

Sadly, because the Oscars ain’t what they used to be, that fact alone could make Jolie a winner in 2009.

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