Changeling

Rating

Director

Clint Eastwood

Screenplay

J. Michael Straczynski

Length

141 min.

Starring

Angelina Jolie, Gattlin Griffith, Michelle Gunn, Michael Kelly, John Malkovich, Colm Feore, Jeffrey Donovan

MPAA Rating

R for some violent and disturbing content, and language.

Review

An unusual title adds complexity to a story that, in the telling, is far more straightforward than one would expect.

Changeling tells the story of a working, single mother whose son disappears while she’s at work and her frantic search to find him. Angelina Jolie stars as Christine Collins, the real life mother whose harrowing experience taking on the Los Angeles Police Department makes for an interesting story and one that doesn’t seem to be one that director Clint Eastwood would want to tell.

But here it is. Set in the 1920s, the Los Angeles police department, hounded for corrupt practices and questionable actions, decides to use Collins’ plight as a publicity mechanism. Finding a boy who they claim to be her son, simply because he says so, and forcing her to accept him became a cause-célèbre that ultimately brought the department to its knees.

Collins knows that the child who claims to be her son and who is forced upon her by the police eager to close the case is not her own, yet cannot convince anyone to believe her. However, as a woman in a period of American history when women were treated more like employees than like respected members of the community and marginalized for their overabundance of emotion, it’s not a large leap for us to recognize her persecution.

Jolie is one of many modern Hollywood celebrities who do tremendous work creating incredible characters, but who find difficulty fully immersing themselves in the character because of jaded cineastes who can only see the actor and not the performance. But, history has proven that some of our greatest performers, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor and many others, were always easily recognizable. Jolie, while not yet an actress deserving of being included in that pantheon, has quietly created a respectable oeuvre of prestige and indie movies (Girl, Interrupted and A Mighty Heart before this) that one day, she may find herself if not mentioned in the same breath, at least within the same chapter as those greats of cinema.

The film is ostensibly about Collins. There aren’t but a small handful of scenes in which she doesn’t appear. In those moments, we finally recognize the other characters in the movie. Michael Kelly is the one non-corrupt cop who seeks a resolution to several child murders that may ultimately bring Collins some closure; John Malkovich plays a local radio evangelist who has made it his mission to bring down the corrupt police department and decides to champion Christine’s case as a way to achieve his goals; and Jeffrey Donovan as the face of the police department who actively works to destabilize and embarrass Collins for irreconcilable acts when she refuses to accept his version of events.

Donovan and Kelly are both quite effective and Malkovich far less so. And, making an all-too-brief appearance as one of Christine’s fellow inmates at a local sanitarium, Amy Ryan gives a bravura five-minute performance as a woman who feels a kinship with Christine and suffers the consequences of speaking out about it and other issues.

But, this is a film about Christine Collins. Everything that happens around her is of radial significance and Jolie does an exceptionally commendable job acting as that center of purpose while blending effectively into her character. It may have been Eastwood who created the environment in which she could shine, but it was her talent that sealed the deal.

Changeling is not a film that breaks into new territory. It’s a poignant, yet relatively safe subject for a filmmaker who has taken on the tortures of adulthood on a child once kidnapped, a prize boxer in a case of euthanasia, and an examination of the horrors of war through the eyes of the enemy. When compared, this film seems a bit of a trifle, but it’s in its sophisticated and well-crafted tone and production values where the film manages to stand on its own and what might have, in a lesser director’s hands, turned into a terminable cliché, manages to stand sufficiently on its own.

Review Written

February 24, 2009