From today's Oregonian....
The bizarre period docudrama "Changeling" kicks off in March 1928, with phone-company supervisor Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) offering the following words of wisdom to her 9-year-old son Walter: "Never pick a fight. Always finish it.... To some people, responsibility is the scariest thing in the world."
She's lecturing young Walt about a fistfight at school and his long-absent father. But her words are really one of those screenwriter's tricks -- where a seemingly innocuous conversation foreshadows the rest of the movie with all the subtlety of a well-swung two-by-four.
Hours later, Walter vanishes without a trace. Five months later, the LAPD tells Christine they've found Walter in Illinois, and arranges a press-event/reunion on a train platform.
But the boy that steps off the train isn't Walter. And a scandal-plagued LAPD captain (Jeffrey Donovan) craves positive press so fiercely, he'll commit Christine to a mental hospital rather than admit to an honest mistake.
For the rest of the movie, only a crusading pastor (John Malkovich) and Christine's moxie can test the notion that "you can't fight City Hall." But will she ever find her son?
This incredible true story was culled from public records by screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski ("Babylon 5"), and it has the sweep of a James Ellroy novel -- drawing in corrupt cops, courtroom dramas, back-room dealings, protests, crusaders, mental-health reforms and assorted dark secrets I won't spoil here.
But I have to wonder: Was Clint Eastwood really the best director for this project?
Don't get me wrong: Eastwood is a national treasure and a steady hand and a Hollywood icon and all that. But if you look at his most successful pictures as a director, I'd argue they tend to be the more intimate, stripped-down dramas with genre trappings and smallish casts ("Unforgiven" being the pluperfect example). Those sorts of movies favor his no-nonsense, almost perfunctory, shoot-the-rehearsals approach to filmmaking.
(Putting it another way: I don't think it's a coincidence that Eastwood's more linear "Letters from Iwo Jima" got more Oscar attention than its companion piece, the epic, time-hopping "Flags of our Fathers.")
I only bring this up because "Changeling" is an extremely weird and frustrating viewing experience -- and I think it's extremely weird and frustrating because Mr. Eastwood, 78, can't be bothered to wrangle the vast material into a tighter shape.
The movie and screenplay are at their best during the Kafkaesque nightmare scenes where doctors and cops get in Christine's face, trying to twist her into thinking she's wrong, deceitful or insane. Straczynski's dialogue is great here, almost "Twilight Zone"-ish, with Jolie shuffling through a tall deck of reactions as sinister actors (especially Donovan) tell her, "'All I'm saying is you're in shock and he's changed. It’s not Walter as you remember him… That's why it's important that you take him home on a trial basis.... His identity has been confirmed by the best minds in child identification."
But taken as a larger piece, the movie just kind of lopes along. It keeps your interest, because the story itself is so strange -- but it also lingers on possibly unimportant details and never builds a real drive train of suspense.
Angelina Jolie is terrific in certain scenes, but she's not always well-used. In individual moments, she gets to cut loose and puts herself through the emotional paces as Christine desperately tries to circumvent various bureaucracies to get at the truth. But then Eastwood will run off for 10 or 20 minutes to explore another thread of the case -- to show us an entire death-row scene we didn't need to see from beginning to end, say, or to linger on a police investigation in the desert, or to show us the electroshock therapy of a supporting character (Amy Ryan) who only appears in a couple of scenes. Suddenly, Jolie is spending long stretches of movie doing little more than having a tear run down her face while she peeks out from underneath a variety of cute flapper hats.
Eastwood and Straczynski also give the story roughly 50 endings, and the director can be too melodramatic or on-the-nose. For example: Did he really need to cast a woman who looks like Nurse Ratched to glare during those electroshock scenes? There's a wandering quality to the picture that makes it feel like several different movies crudely stitched together: a '40s woman-in-trouble melodrama, a socially conscious courtroom drama, an "L.A. Confidential"-style thriller.... I worry that in their quest to fit in all the outlandish real-life details, the filmmakers never quite made up their mind in the editing room.
In about two months, though, Eastwood is releasing his next directorial effort: a stripped-down story with thriller trappings called "Gran Torino," about a bigot (played by Eastwood) reluctantly drawn into the violence-torn lives of his next-door neighbors. I'll bet good money it’s better than "Changeling."
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C; 141 minutes; rated R for violent and disturbing content, and language.
'Changeling' (The Oregonian, Friday, Oct. 31, 2008)
I just translated an interview with Clint Eastwood about this movie. He is so in love with Angelina...he was saying that she is one of the most talented actresses of her generation and all that...well, I guess I will watch the film to see her performance.
Posted by: Vanessa | December 17, 2008 at 07:17 AM
Dear sir or madam,
another wierd thing: there were no electroshocks in use in the time that the movie plays. They came in use years later and first only in Italy.So: no true story, more like true fiction.
Karel Odink,psychologist, Amsterdam Holland
Posted by: Karel Odink | May 31, 2009 at 01:27 AM