Changeling
With so many great movies of late, Clint Eastwood has probably set expectations for his films to unreasonable levels. So when he makes a merely good film, like Changeling, it feels like a major disappointment.
While Changeling is certainly a step back for Eastwood, that hardly makes it an unwatchable mess. In fact, it's actually an extremely well-produced, well-acted film that kind of resembles Eastwood's adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Changeling is not based on a non-fiction book, but it is based on a true story and both films have the same structural problem: too much good information that was hard to put on the cutting room floor.
Spanning several years, beginning in 1928 Los Angeles, the story is a harrowing one: Single mother Christine Collins comes home from work one day to find her eight-year-old son missing. Six months later the Los Angeles police department, renowned for its putrescence at the time, claims to have located her son and brings back a boy who clearly is not Walter Collins. Mrs. Collins enlists the help of a popular minister who crusades against LAPD corruption on his radio program, but to no avail. Rather than cop to his obvious mistake, Captain J. J. Jones insists Ms. Collins is off her rocker and eventually has her institutionalized.
Every performance in Changeling is stellar, from John Malkovich's indignant preacher to Angelina Jolie's tormented mother. The script walks Jolie's character right up to the edge of melodrama and teeters precariously there, yet almost every scene with Jolie still feels like a plea to Academy voters: “and the Oscar goes to...”
Jeffrey Donovan (of the nifty USA Network program Burn Notice) is fantastic as the stubbornly corrupt Capt. Jones, simultaneously affecting a very difficult first-generation Irish-American accent and callous indifference to this poor woman whose already tormented life has been further anguished by his absolute malevolence.
There are several more gripping performances which don't come into play until the film takes an unexpectedly gruesome turn at the halfway point, and that's when Changeling gets weirdly fascinating and laborious at the same time. Each semi-resolution to Ms. Collins' horrible odyssey opens up another storyline which must be seen through to its conclusion. Changeling has more endings than Saturday matinée serial, and few of them do anything to address the needs of the central character. As the film drags on and on, despite its interesting and macabre subject matter, it's clear that Eastwood and screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski were more interested in recreating an historical docudrama than exploring the psychology of this distraught woman, whose loss of her son led, in some respects, to the betterment of the citizens of Los Angeles at the turn of the 1930s.