Clint Eastwood is one of our country’s greatest artists – a director so surefooted you are willing to follow wherever he chooses to lead. His latest effort, Changeling is no exception.
The movie is based on a true story, and Eastwood has the common sense to know which events matter and which don’t in this telling of one women’s fight against a corrupt system in her quest to find her missing son. I went Googling after the movies…It really is one helluva story, and underscores, as the movie No Country for Old Men does, that evil has and will always be with us — even in what we think were more innocent times.
Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) is a single mom raising her nine-year-old son Walter in 1920s Los Angeles. The City of Angels is tarnished by a corrupt police department that appear to be worse than any of the criminals they’ve systematically gunned down. When Walter goes missing, Christine doesn’t get much help from the boys in blue until months later when they insist they’ve found her son.
The kid who comes rolling into town isn’t Walter –he’s 3 inches shorter which is the most obvious clue – but what the hey, trauma can do that to a person. Not to mention Christine isn’t that far gone that she wouldn’t know at first sight that this kid is an imposter. The LAPD is using the case as a PR strategy to show what a swell upstanding department they are, so they refuse to be swayed by Christine’s insistence that they must continue to search for her real son.
Christine is aided by an unlikely hero — the Reverend Gustav Briegleb played by the ever-more-interesting as-he-ages John Malkovich. Briegleb isn’t your typical movie-style religious fanatic but an activist who uses his radio program to rail against the LAPD and call attention to Christine’s plight. Malkovich hits all the right notes in a performance that could have gone way south in the wrong hands.
When Christine is wrongfully stuck in the looney bin because she dares to oppose the cops, it’s Briegleb that helps get her sprung, aided by a high-powered lawyer who is not afraid of taking the whole department down.
[Spoiler alert -- and I did not see this coming so you may not want to either...]
The real twist to the story is that while all this tormented mom vs. evil cops is going on — there’s a unexpectedly dreadful reason Walter and other young boys have gone missing. A determined and honest detective named Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly) is assigned to nab Canadian teenager Sanford Clark who’s in the country illegally and get him back to his homeland. When he finds the youth, Clark tells him a horrific story of blood and death that leads to uncovering the buried bodies of 20 young boys – one of them may be Walter.
The maniacial killer is Clark’s older cousin, Gordon Northcott, played by Jason Butler Harner.
Harner is scary, but not because he goes for the typical psycho route. He’s all fake charm and sweat, a guy who by turns is giddy with the media attention he obtains and full of self-pity because he has been caught. It’s a standout performance.Harner doesn’t so much “play” Northcott – he inhabits him. He’s that freaky, scary, icky good.
The two things that really bothered me – I can’t help it — but when I am staring up at that gi-normous movie screen the unrealistic aspects pop out like big red stray pimples. First, in every scene Jolie is made up to look like a va-va-voom movie star — in fact, the very first scene, when she’s getting out of bed her hair is curled, her eye shadow lusciously dark. It’s distracting because you want to get lost in her character. Let’s face it, Jolie is no slouch in the looks department and it seems overkill here. I am reminded of some of Eastwood’s other leading ladies — Sondra Lockhart for one, or the washed-out hardness of Carrie Snodgrass in Pale Rider – and wish someone had just kept the overzealous make-up artist away, away, away from Jolie. Her performance is okay, but not for one single solitary second do I forget just who she is.
The other thing is the score. I know Eastwood composed it but I kept thinking to myself – if I hear those same notes over again…I may just…(scream). I am always reminded when I don’t like a movie soundtrack of how pitch-perfect Scorcese’s music choices always are. He’s the benchmark.
But — I kept telling myself, Eastwood composed the music. What, huh? really? I mean, is there anything Clint can’t do? He just gets better with age.
