Review of Changeling (15)

11:07am Wednesday 26th November 2008

Comments (0)   Have your say »

NOTHING grips the nation’s collective attention more than a news story involving a child.

Clint Eastwood’s Changeling brings to the big screen a 1920s case, a devastating travesty and tragedy so inherently dramatic that, no matter how it was presented, it would shock and impress audiences.

He begins with some rosy scenes between single mother Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) and her son, Walter, accompanied by a dreadfully overcooked piano-led soundtrack. But then Walter disappears while she’s at work. Devastated to discover that she must wait 24 hours to report that he’s missing, Christine is further traumatised by the lackadaisical reaction of the LAPD.

Months pass before she receives a phone call informing her that Walter has been found. But the young boy who greets her at the train station is clearly not her son, a fact the police seem disturbingly reluctant to accept.

Without wishing to give the plot away completely, I can say only that things get much more complicated. This is a sad film, full of trauma and injustice, which accelerates as Christine’s determination to find her boy propels the misogynistic LAPD into a terrible course of evasive action, keen to keep negative publicity to a minimum.

As much as I’m glad that this woman’s case has finally been turned into a form of cinematic justice, I do, however, have some problems with some of Eastwood’s decisions regarding his film.

It’s too long for a start, really trying the patience of its audience towards the end, and neglecting to mention in its end notes the final sadness of Christine’s life, that she herself died in 1935 just after the events of the case finally concluded.

Audiences may also find it impossible to leave their Angelina Jolie baggage at the cinema doors. She tends to select similar Oscar-bait roles these days, and, of course, she actually secured a win for her performance in Girl, Interrupted, playing a crazy girl back when she was, in real life, a bit crazy. Now she hides her tattoos and is an earth mother, that’s, accordingly, what she wants to be on screen.

Her performance is quite mannered and strangely unmoving, involving lots of putting her hands to her face, but she doesn’t break your heart. This would have been a fantastic opportunity for a less famous actress to do just that, making her name in the process.

Performances elsewhere are impressive, especially John Malkovich as a preacher who sees Christine’s case as a perfect vehicle through which to attack the corruption in the LAPD, Jeffrey Donovan as the cold police captain, and Jason Butler Harner as Gordon Northcott.

Changeling is also too sci-fi a title for what’s a real and particularly human tragedy. As a film, though, it still succeeds, despite all this, because you’ll be transfixed by the real drama and because it’s inconceivable that miscarriages of justice like this were allowed to happen.

But, of course, they still are. And that’s our modern tragedy.