Changeling

Changeling (2008) – on rental. One has to hand it to Clint Eastwood. As an actor, his roles as the tough-guy with sardonic wit and humor were always memorable. As a director however, he’s produced critically-acclaimed film after film. Two films he’s directed have already won the Academy’s Best Picture award.

Eastwood’s two films in 2008 were Gran Turino and Changeling, and both were covering different material thematically. Between the two though, it’s Changeling though that’s left on me an indelible impression.

The film is a dramatization of a real event that happened in 1920s Los Angeles. Christine Collins (played by Angelina Jolie) is a single working mother who loves her quiet and shy 9 year old son, Walter. One evening while she has to work overtime, Walter disappears. The Los Angeles Police Department, already suffering from public accusations of incompetence and corruption, tries to find the missing boy, and supposedly do five months after Walter’s disappearance.

One problem though: “That’s not my son!” Christine insists.

The LAPD is desperate for good publicity and the last thing it wants is for its image to get further tarnished through accusations that they’ve messed up again and they’ve got the wrong boy. Police Captain J. J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) refuses to listen to Ms. Collin’s pleadings, and instead discredits her and accuses her of intentionally causing difficulties and neglecting her son to the point she can’t recognize her own. Christine is forced by the police department into a psychopathic word against her will, and undergoes systematic emotional abuse by the ward’s doctors in order to squeeze a voluntary confession that she was mistaken.

Things reach a head when it is discovered that many boys who’ve similarly disappeared may had been murdered by a psychopathic killer. Christine’s defenders include a Presbyterian minister, played by John Malkovich who though gets second billing in the cast list doesn’t for a change overshadow his opposite number, and a very skilled lawyer who is normally too expensive to hire, but upon learning Ms. Collins’ cause volunteers to take her case pro bono.

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The film is based on an actual series of accidents surrounding the grisly murders of several young boys in 1928. The incident became known as the Chicken Coup Murders, and isn’t well-known enough for viewers to spoil the suspense in watching the film’s events unfold unless one goes ahead to reads the historical account on Wikipedia before watching the film first. Pieces of information are gradually revealed, and even at the film’s end, not all of its questions are answered.

But Ms. Collins’ journey as told through the film’s dramatization is what counts. And it is both a terrifying and saddening yet affirming tale of the love a mother has for her child. Angelina Jolie has been in a diverse range of roles: either raiding tombs, as an assassin with a husband in the same vocation, as an assassin who can curve bullets, mother of an emperor but with a funky Greek accent, or simply a seducer. But her role as the grieving but determined mother in Changeling is for me her best performance and I think will be her most defining work. She was nominated a Best Actress award for her role as Ms. Collins and deserves it: you will feel her pain, her anguish, and your heart will cry out for her as she endures trial after trial.

Clint Eastwood’s films have made use of CG but never let it draw attention or take center stage. His 1920s Los Angeles I read was filmed on location using real vehicles and backdrops of its time with some embellishment in the computer. But it’s so skillfully meshed together in Changeling that you just can’t tell where reality ends and digital work begins: not unlike say the New York scenes in Peter Jackson’s King Kong whose story was set in a similar time period. The music score is lovely but yet unintrusive in the movie.

Changeling isn’t an easy film to watch. Parts of it will be terrifying, not because of the visual spectacle or gore: but the emotional tearing of seeing a mother grieve for her son. I’ve seen a lot of good films this year, but Changeling is now one of the two best films I’ve watched this year (the other is Doubt starring Amy Adams, Meryl Streep, and Philip Seymour Hoffman; blogged here in May this year.)

If I could award a six star film, I would. Since I can’t, it’s still an absolutely unquestionable…