6 reviews

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Helen Ward December 31, 2008

The year is 1928. When Christine Collins’ 9 year old son Walter vanishes from their home in suburban Los Angeles, normality crumbles around her.

After months of anguish, hope is restored when police Captain J.J. Jones gives Christine the news that Walter has been found and escorts her to the station for an emotional public reunion. That’s when the real nightmare begins. Christine swears that the boy isn’t her son. The police refuse to believe her: the last thing that the institutionally corrupt LAPD needs is bad publicity.

Dealing with emotive and disturbing themes including child abduction, murder and the control of “socially deviant” women by powerful, “rational” men, the film draws its dramatic strength from a well-paced, almost understated, narrative.

High production values, giving a strong sense of time and place, combine with flawless performances and a first rate script to make Changeling a masterpiece of the film-maker’s craft.

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Russell George December 5, 2008

Changeling would seem unbelievable if it had not been based on real-life events. In 1928 in Los Angeles, 9 year old Walter Collins went missing. When a boy claiming to be Walter was discovered in Illinois, the LAPD - facing charges of corruption throughout the city - saw the re-uniting of mother and child as useful PR. The problem was it wasn’t Walter. When his mother, Christine, (Angelina Jolie), demanded that they continue the search for her son, she was thrown into an asylum. The police claimed that she was trying to abandon her duties as a mother.

But this is only the beginning. The search for Walter Collins stretches the story into even darker territory, a tale about the disempowerment of children as well as women. It leaves you appalled and amazed in equal measure.

And in Jolie, the film has a leading actress whose performance is admirably restrained throughout. There are very few scenes when she is not faced with something emotionally charged – the role is designed for an Oscar nomination - but she never descends into hysterical caricature, and only a couple of poor pieces of dialogue push her towards cliché. And whilst the various male authority figures are darkly one dimensional, the creepy presence of John Malkovich as the campaigning preacher Rev. Briegleb, Jolie’s only ally, provides the film with a useful contrast. It’s difficult to watch Malkovich without being somehow suspicious of his motives. The portrayal of Gordon Northcott by Jason Butler Harmer is also interesting and provocative.

Directed by Clint Eastwood (Mystic River), the film moves along with pace, and the linking of Walter’s initial disappearance to later events is subtle enough. It’s also wonderfully detailed in portraying 1920s Los Angeles, but though reminiscent of James Elroy narratives, Eastwood chooses not to explore the more horrific aspects to the story. Still, it’s heart-breaking stuff at points, not least the pleas for mercy from Northcott towards the end.

It was uncomfortable to think these events actually happened, and in the relatively recent past, but Eastwood does well to let the story speak for itself. Changeling is an intense political noir, a thriller that will make you wonder whether anything like this could happen today. Unfortunately, with governments pushing for longer periods of time to keep prisoners without charge, it probably could.

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Glenn Watson December 2, 2008

Changeling clinches Clint Eastwood’s transformation from cheroot-chewing cowboy to cinematic legend. And Angelina Jolie confounds her critics with a cracking portrayal of a mother campaigning to find her lost child.

Set in the 1920s and based on a true story, Jolie is Christine Collins, a single mother whose world collapses when her son goes missing. Weeks later, when the police claim to have found him, Christine denies that the boy’s her son. The police refuse to listen and Christine’s emotional freefall is taken as mental instability. With the aid of a firebrand preacher, Christine turns the tables on a corrupt police force. But will the truth ever be told?

Emotional, compelling and gorgeously shot, Changeling is a pearl of a film. Grippingly paced by Eastwood, this is Jolie’s film and it’s her impressively nuanced performance that sweeps it forward – and should rightly sweep the Oscars. Yet her playing’s so subtle, so committed, it taints her achievement to mention awards.

Eastwood’s typically restrained direction allows free rein to an exhausting yet satisfying journey in which the emotional stakes get higher and higher. Changeling’s a drama, a thriller, a police procedural and a mystery. And Eastwood cleverly shoots the most disturbing scenes obliquely, hinting rather than hammering.

John Malkovich’s politico-preacher is the right side of caricature. So too Jeffrey Donovan as Christine’s smilingly-sinister, police-captain nemesis (roles which Donovan, since his bully-boy turn in Hitch, seems fated to play). But Michael Kelly quietly impresses as the one doggedly-good cop – an intriguing opposite to Dirty Harry’s blow-em-away detective.

Eastwood is one of America’s finest directors. Painting miniatures in widescreen, he homes in on characters, setting them in a beautifully rendered landscape of urban bustle or windblown plains. And in Angelina Jolie, Eastwood’s met his soulmate. Both made a name as cartoon-cut-outs: and now Dirty Harry - and the Man with No Name – meets Lara Croft and the gun-toting assassins of Wanted and Mr and Mrs Smith.

Both are icons who outgrew the personas that made them famous. Both are unafraid to air their beliefs: he became a mayor, she a humanitarian ambassador. And both find their true home with heart-of-darkness dramas – Jolie most recently with A Mighty Heart and Eastwood with Mystic River, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. No surprise that Changeling works so well.

A wonderful scene is Christine playfully hovering by a radio set to hear if her tip for the Oscar – It Happened One Night – will win. It’s a lovely moment. Playing with Changeling’s own Oscar-worthiness it points back, too, to the bygone era of Eastwood’s movie-going boyhood.

What a terrific film. What a pity that Clint Eastwood was overlooked for an Oscar for Producer or Director - just like with Gran Torino. I don't understand what the judging criteria is but both these films did not deserve to be overlooked for Oscar nominations.

Cyclone 15 Feb 2009

I must agree with Glenn Watson about this film. I found it totally gripping. It is beautifully shot and Jolie's performance was also brilliantly convincing - proof of her adaptability as an actress.

Pegasus 5 Dec 2008

Changeling has an intriguing story to tell, but somehow it never manages to be more than moderately engaging. It's very recognizably a Clint Eastwood movie (reverent, deliberate, about half an hour too long) and while it's nowhere near as tedious as Millon Dollar Baby, it's still a watch-checker.

Angelina Jolie does a serviceable job as the wronged mother, but one is always conscious of her giving a 'serious' performance. As a period mystery based on truth and set in California, the obvious parallel is Zodiac, and it suffers badly in comparison - you're left wondering what a director with David Fincher's brio might have made of this material. As it stands, Changeling feels like worthy, calculated Oscar-bait rather than anything genuinely special.

Young Offender 5 Dec 2008