Review: Changeling

*** / *****

"The boy they brought back is not my son."

Changeling is Clint Eastwood's middling account of the struggles of Christine Collins (a real-life heroine played with sheer grace and elegance by a graceful and elegant woman, Angelina Jolie), a single mum who loses her son and when the L. A. police reunited her with a different boy, protests and because of that, becomes a hapless victim of the embattled police force's determination to salvage whatever integrity and reputation it had left under its corrupt leadership. The film has the same somber and sober tone of all of Eastwood's post-Unforgiven films, but unlike Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby or Letters From Iwo Jima, Changeling's pessimistic core dressed in multi-million dollar gloss is often mistaken as aesthetic sophistication and thematic depth, thus garnering much popular and critical acclaim for what basically is heavy-handed humdrum.

Undoubtedly, like most of Eastwood's more recent features, Changeling is visually wonderful. Cinematographer Tom Stern paints this unideal Los Angeles with muted hues that seemingly allude to the moral and political condition of that era: hazy, fading, paling. 1920s-Los Angeles is impressively recreated, from the rows of suburban homes that house the newly affluent middle class to the decrepit abandoned farm in the outskirts of the city that becomes the setting of the horrendous massacre which is the core of the narrative. Populating these structures and edifices are citizens and transients who are occupied by their respective little businesses involving family and employment. The atmosphere of moral and political disarray is conveniently hidden by the bright Californian sun, until an impetus for its timely revelation occurs.

The film primarily concerns itself with Christine's own little entanglements which quickly transformed into the gargantuan task, the aforementioned impetus, of defeating the seemingly indestructible authority, something which she was volunteered for not by her own choosing but by fate and the repercussions of living in a corrupted city. J. Michael Straczynski, in his screenplay, is adamantly straightforward in forwarding the virtues of his headstrong heroine, but in so doing, branches into a myriad of unwieldy subplots and introduces a bevy of mono-dimensional side characters, including John Malkovich's Rev. Gustav Briegleb, a Presbyterian minister whose consistently forceful verbal attacks against the police and mental manipulation of Christine feels obnoxiously monomaniacal, Jeffrey Donovan's Captain J. J. Jones, the bad cop whose quintessential grimaces leave nothing to the imagination, and Jason Butler Harner's Gordon Northcott, the serial killer whose attempts at moral and psychological vagueness is more unconvincing than unsettling.

Eastwood's usually guileless and elegant storytelling seems inappropriate for Straczynski's pulpy material. There's a suspect air of reverence, facilitated by Straczynski's over-respectful tribute to his obscure protagonist, Eastwood's consistently competent although unremarkable direction, and Jolie's uncharacteristically quiet but affecting turn as the perpetually suffering Christine Collins, that permeates throughout the film. It's an air of reverence that is particularly suffocating and this film, from its introduction of depicting Christine as timid yet industrious single mother (we see her at her workplace, well-loved, responsible, and diligently skating around before returning home to tend to her son) to the emotional trials she patiently goes through, delivers in unrelenting doses.

Changeling is a masterpiece to stubborn Eastwood-followers, gullible feminists, and connoisseurs of high melodrama and manipulative weepers. I also suspect mysoginists who actually "enjoy" some of Lars Von Trier's post-Denmark films (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Manderlay), all of which depict women suffering through very cruel twists of fate, when their single purpose is to show us for what we are: ugly creatures, will be comfortable seeing Jolie bullied by the police into accepting a stranger as her son, dragged into the loony bin, and stripped and washed like filthy cattle. To present-day cynics, or even those of us who have admired the simplicity of Eastwood's storytelling and Jolie's natural gift as an actress, Changeling is a disappointment that borders on being torture.