Changeling

Films based on real events usually acquire an extra frisson of emotional resonance due to our awareness of their origin. Ironically Clint Eastwood’s Changeling manages to reverse the effect simply because it seems to our real world eyes to be more fiction than fact. Is it possible, we ask ourselves, that even a hundred years ago that the police, chauvinistic, even misogynistic, as they may have been back in the day  would insist that a) a woman doesn’t know her own son and b) not have the ability to establish the facts of the matter (a real child would have surely been easy to "crack").

Angelina Jolie plays Christine Collins  a single mother and supervisor in an L.A. telephone exchange in the late 1920s. She is called in to do some overtime and leaves her nine-year old son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) to look after himself in their apartment. When she returns he has disappeared. At first the L.A.P.D. refuse to look for him but when the incident turns into a cause célèbre thanks partly to the efforts of moral crusader, the Reverend Briegleb (John Malkovich), the powers that be see it as an opportunity to renovate the Department’s tarnished reputation. After five months they turn up a child claiming to be Walter and refuse to listen when Christine claims the boy is an imposter. For her stubbornness she gets sent to the booby hatch. Meanwhile it turns out that there’s a killer on the loose who might be able to resolve the mystery.

Eastwood is a mainstream director whose eye for a good story regularly outstrips his skill in telling it. As is typical of his films the production values here are top-notch and the performances solid (although I was confused by Malkovich’s turn, his characteristic sibilant unctuousness initially suggesting a villainy that never surfaces) but unlike 2003’s Mystic River which dealt with thematically-related material Eastwood keeps us at arm’s length from the tragedy. A painfully-thin Jolie is striking as the grieving but indefatigable mother in what in many ways, particularly when it comes to Christine’s incarceration (in this respect compare it to Jessica Lange’s performance in 1983’s Frances and Jolie’s own Oscar-winning performance in Girl, Interrupted,1999), is a B-grade film masquerading as A-grade drama.

FYI: Jolie was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar but did not win.

 

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