I can't believe it's been two whole weeks since the premiere. I'm sorry I haven't posted before now. I started this mini-review last week but kept getting sidetracked before I could finish it.
WARNING: This is the "no spoiler" thread, but I'm going to assume that from the advance publicity, everyone knows at least a few basic facts about the film, so if you really don't know anything and don't want to know anything, you can stop reading right here.
Changeling is based on the true story of Christine Collins (played by Angelina Jolie), whose nine-year-old son Walter vanished from a quiet Los Angeles neighborhood in March, 1928. Several months later, the police announced they had found the missing boy in the Middle West. When the boy was brought to Los Angeles, Christine knew right away that it was not her son, but was unable to persuade the police they had made a mistake. Eventually, on the orders of the police captain in charge of her case (Jeffrey Donovan), she was confined to the county's psychopathic ward and told she would not be released unless she signed a statement admitting that the impostor child was her own. A Presbyterian minister (John Malkovich) who has embarked on a crusade against police corruption is on her side, however, and is able to secure her release. Meanwhile, on a miserable chicken farm in a rural area nearby, traces of a horrible crime spree are uncovered, for which one Gordon Stewart Northcott (Jason Butler Harner) would in due course be tried and convicted. In another courtroom at the same time, a hearing in the case of Captain Jones, Christine's principal tormentor, would be held. The film doesn't end with these parallel courtroom scenes, however, but continues to follow the story for several more years to its inconclusive end in 1935.
I liked the film quite a lot on a first viewing. It's true that it's all on a very high, melodramatic pitch, with few moments of repose after the opening scenes, and it's also one of the few Eastwood-directed films I can recall with no humor to speak of. What makes it work for me is the knowledge that it all really happened more or less exactly the way it's told in the film. I suppose it shouldn't be that way; the story should work as a story, not because it's history, but this is such a powerful true story that it overwhelms considerations of what makes a "good" fictional tale.
The period setting is well done. I did find Jolie's makeup a bit distracting, especially since the bright red lipstick she wears calls attention to her most prominent facial feature, her full lips. I kept wondering whether Eastwood was making a point with that look (especially since "good" women in his films have traditionally been the ones with no makeup) ... perhaps you could make a case that it makes her appear all the more powerful and intimidating. She's a threat to the men of the LAPD, because she's a woman who refuses to "know her place." It's established that she's a fighter in an early scene with her son, when she tells him he should never start a fight, but always finish one. When the fight is for the life of that son, the one thing in her life she holds most dear, there is no doubt that she will keep on fighting until the finish.
The performances were excellent. Jolie, of course, is impeccable in the part of the desperate but indomitable mother. Among the others, I especially enjoyed seeing John Malkovich in a good-guy role (for once), but all the lesser-known actors did very well with their parts. Even the child actors were good; the "changeling" boy was subtly creepy, recalling stories of troll children or fairy children that are exchanged for human ones … this is one of the original meanings of "changeling." The young actor who played Northcote's unwilling accomplice was moving in his big confessional scene. Jason Butler Harner as Northcott not only resembles him physically but gives a jumpy, occasionally over-the-top performance that seems to exactly match contemporary descriptions of his behavior. (I should confess that I "researched" this case a bit myself, in the archives of the
Los Angeles Times, available online at my library (
selected stories now also available via a link from the
Changeling website), and in contemporary photographs, which are available free on the
Los Angeles Library website.) (Thanks to Dan Dassow for sending me a series of photos from this source.)
I think it's an interesting exercise to count up the recurrent Eastwood thenes in this movie. First, there's the abducted child … which recalls
A Perfect World, and more recently
Mystic River. In some ways,
Changeling is a nightmare counterpart to
A Perfect World, in which, as in
Changeling, the only son of a single mother is stolen away from her, but in that case, very soon thereafter the "good" abductor kills the "bad" one and proceeds to treat the child victim, not to anything harmful, but to the adventure of a lifetime, before he's returned to the mother at the film's end. Similar to
Changeling, however, is the way the authorities charged with recovering the child are presented in a generally sinister light.
Capital punishment, and the interrelated question of society's search for justice in the face of murder, is another frequent theme of Eastwood's, going all the way back to
Hang 'Em High. Especially in recent years, it seems to turn up regularly in Eastwood's films:
Absolute Power,
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,
True Crime, and
Mystic River all deal with it in one way or another.
Finally, the twin themes of police corruption and police incompetence figure in virtually all of Eastwood's cop movies, beginning with the
Dirty Harry series. Notably, in
The Gauntlet, it's heightened to the point of caricature; but that caricature comes startlingly close to the historical truth behind the incredible case of Christine Collins and the contemporary LAPD. Even the "death squad" and police vigilantism of
Magnum Force apparently had a historical counterpart in 1920s Los Angeles.
Structurally, this is one of Eastwood's most linear films in recent years. In order to broaden the scope from a simple A-B-C narrative, he does resort to frequent flashbacks, mostly brief and suggesting more than they show, which illuminate the more vivid moments as they're recalled in various characters' testimony.
Finally, the picture ends on an Eastwoodian note of ambiguity, as one more surprising development in the Collins/Northcote case renews Christine's hope about her son's ultimate fate, at the same time as it provides the audience with a satisfying denouement while leaving it up to each member of the audience to decide how the story is ultimately resolved.
I'm sorry if the above is a little ragged and incomplete. I may have more to say after a second viewing!
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