CHANGELING

Release Date:	October 31, 2008
Directed by:	Clint Eastwood
Genre:	Crime/Drama/Mystery/Thriller
Starring:	Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Colm Feore, Amy Ryan, Michael Kelly & Jason Bulter Harner
Approx. Runtime:	141 min.
MPAA Rating:	R for Some Violent and Disturbing Content, and Language

“. . . comes across like a rough cut, which is odd for a film whose importance of subject Mr. Eastwood would appear to intend such poignancy and imperativeness towards.”Clint Eastwood throws everything he knows about directing into his movies. Through the meticulously striped down direction that’s dominated the latter part of his stunning late career resurgence, he has become something of a cinematic equivalent of Hemingway in his sparse, but precise prose. With his carefully constructed, unassuming naturalism, Mr. Eastwood’s emotional thrift and visual directness makes his pictures both temporary and classical in their masterful probings of beautifully modulated sadness and despair. Arguably our greatest living American film maker, Changeling–his latest picture, adapted from a screenplay by J. Michael Straczynski–reinvigorates Eastwood’s angry obsession with American violence and the limits of its legal judicial systems, working from the foundations of the famed Wineville Chicken Murders that horded the state of California into stunned hysteria in the late 1920's.

Angelina Jolie, directed to a weep in almost every shot, stars as Christine Collins whose 9 year old son, Walter, disappeared from their Los Angeles-area home without a trace in the spring of 1928 to the dismay of many town citizens including studio preacher and Reverend Gustav Briegleb who was quick to rail against the Police Department and its seeming incompetence. Following the fruitless search, the mothers prayers would appear to have been answered when another boy claiming to be Walter shows up on her doorstep. A public reunion is organized by police, who believe that the positive publicity will eliminate some of the harsh criticism it’s recently faced.

When, however, Christine quickly begins to suspect that this new child is not her son–overcome with emotion and uncertain as to how to face the press–she takes the child home with her on a strictly trial basis, knowing beyond any doubt that he is not her son. Determined to suppress her protests, the LAPD quickly blame emotional trauma as the cause of the boys physical inconsistencies–which covered his shortened height of three inches, circumcision and altered dental records–before ultimately denouncing her criminally insane and locking her up in a psychiatric ward with the weight of the captain’s signature as its sole legal justification.

Meanwhile, the public and its loyal studio preacher are up in arms against unlawful corruption within the police, Detective Lester Ybarra stumbles upon the similar disappearance of an illegal immigrant from Canada which leads him to a fateful visit to the infamous Northcott ranch and the bodies of 20 boys whose deaths would rock the country and become one of the most enduring criminal investigations in Southern Calfornia legal history.

This is grim material Mr. Eastwood is working from here. As with his masterful 2003 adaption of Dennis Lehane’s novel Mystic River and the unbroken string of triumphs in its wake–the brilliant Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima–Eastwood’s tale is a hard one to shake. Though consistently overplayed and a tad too highly pitched, Changeling–at its very simplest–succeeds in that, quite simply, it holds you consistently. Whilst working from the blueprint of a contemporary thriller, Changeling rarely veers from its stoically gripping police blotter tone though it too often pins itself down as a decidedly medieval enterprise from the gloom shoveled upon it relentlessly by Eastwood in its latter acts which lends it a weirdly off kilter quality, ringing falseness in its every disjointed twist and turn. A terrifying story even underplayed, Eastwood shoots as he would some historical horror freak show; minus the haunted, restrained menace of, say, David Fincher’s under lauded 2007 serial killer survey, Zodiac.

Something less than the fundamental sum of its parts, Changeling never completely collapses, but it doesn’t particularly take off either. The main problem here is that, alongside Ms. Jolie’s madhouse One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest venture, the pictures secondary story involving the plight of Lester Ybarra and his subsequent investigations and revelations involving the boys disappearances and the murders of the Northcott ranch has a tendency of straying of wiping Christine’s legal crusade of any dramatic energy it may otherwise have satisfied. Clocking in at over 140 deliberate minutes, the interminable movie comes across like a rough cut, which odd for a film whose importance of subject Mr. Eastwood would appear to intend such poignancy and imperativeness towards.

When not doing somersaults to direct attention in the way of his theatrics or mining for injustice within its ham-handed subject matter, Eastwood also seems to receive an immense pleasure in shoving Ms. Jolie’s beautiful stuttering, shuttering and suffering face into the camera at angles of lit-low unease as if to remind his audience of the emotions they themselves should be feeling whilst drawing in his direction the eyes of Academy voters they strive so desperately to captivate in their dominating chivalry.

Notably absent in the uncharacteristically intrusive orchestra of dread and suffering that is the vivid icon of misfortune as portrayed by Ms. Jolie is the calm, astute sure handedness so efficiently utilized in the underscoring of realism and melodrama of Mr. Eastwood’s preceding pictures. Unnoticed then, will surely go the secondary work of veteran theater performer Jason Butler Harner, whose performance as the psychotic creep Gordon Northcott–a morally abysmal portrait of hysterical insanity–fits quite neatly alongside Heath Ledger’s gloriously menacing Joker of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Dark Knight.

To Mr. Eastwood’s credit, it is exhilarating–in this time of flashy directors who slice and dice their films in such dizzy editing rhythms–to remember that movies can still look and listen and sympathize with their stories and their characters. Our finest film makers, after all, have garnered their prestigious reputations but subtracting, rather than adding. Visually, Changeling Eastwood does nothing for show and everything for effect. Straining, however, for greatness and grandiosity the pictures ponderous direction and screenplay are oddly disheartening turns amidst the directors late-career evolution and the factual turmoil of the Christine Collins mysteries, from which Mr. Eastwood delivers his most tepid picture this decade