Country: United Kingdom
Genre: Drama/ Mainstream
Director: Clint Eastwood
Year: 2008
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
In Changeling, director Clint Eastwood has a helluva (true) story to tell. Too bad certain key elements are just a tad off.
Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a single mother, comes back from work one day to find her son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) missing. After five months and much handwringing, the police announce that they have found the boy. The only trouble is that the kid is three inches short than Walter. He’s lying about who he is, but why?
The police refuse to believe Christine when she says that the boy isn’t her son, and they close the case.
From this brief description, you might think “Meh. Doesn’t sound that interesting.”
Well, that’s just the top layer of a compost pile that gets darker and wormier the deeper you burrow. Before the end credits, we’ll witness baroque ghastliness that rivals the novels of James Ellroy, the noir poet of LA. (And I thought that Ellroy was exaggerating the depravity of Los Angeles all these years — I guess not.)
I think Clint Eastwood made the connection, too. The actor who plays the corrupt police captain is Jeffrey Donovan, who bears a physical and vocal resemblance to Guy Pierce, who starred in L.A. Confidential, based on Ellroy’s novel.
Okay, we’ve established that Changeling has an interesting story to tell, but is it any good?
The first challenge that director Clint Eastwood faced was to evoke 1920’s Los Angeles. His old pal art director Henry Bumstead had passed away, so he used James J. Murakami instead. Murakami does a great job. There are fun details like the supervisor at the telephone wearing roller skates so she can get to the telephone operators faster. You’re instantly drawn into a different world, at least visually. Costume designer Deborah Hopper also does her job. The clothes look right.
Where the filmmakers run into trouble is with casting. And oddly enough, it isn’t the faces that are the trouble. For example, if you were to freeze frame Angelina Jolie at any point in the movie, she absolutely could pass as a flapper. The trouble is when she opens her mouth or moves. It isn’t that Jolie acts the part badly. Not at all. She’s perfectly convincing as a worried and determined mother. It’s just that her essence is irretrievably modern. It’s like a time machine plunked her down in 1920’s Los Angeles.
To a greater or lesser extent, this goes for most of the actors and actresses in the film. The problem is thrown into high relief when Jim Quillen, a former inmate of Alcatraz who plays the man running an execution, appears in the film. His reactions, as when he’s embarrassed for a man about to be hanged as he pleads for his life, are absolutely authentic and appropriate for the time period. Quillen is absolutely believable as a man living in the 1920s in a way that nobody else in the film is.
Every time someone speaks or moves in a way that is modern, it shatters the illusion that the production design crew so painstakingly assembled.
A lesser problem is that director Clint Eastwood sometimes extends scenes beyond their natural ending point, especially when Angelina Jolie is in some emotionally extreme state. The reason for this is obvious. He was trying to win his star an Oscar. After a while, it becomes embarrassing to witness Jolie vamping and trembling her puffy lips.
These flaws don’t completely wreck Changeling, but they keep it from being great or even very good. Still, with a story this compelling, Changeling can’t help but be riveting for most of it’s running time.
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