“CHANGELING” The true story of Christine Collins

The true story of Christine Collins

“CHANGELING”

TO FIND HER SON, SHE DID WHAT NO ONE ELSE DARED

A Boy Gone, a Mother Scorned

Toward the end of Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling,” in what is perhaps the only lighthearted scene in this rigorously somber film, Christine Collins, the heroine, is invited by some of her phone company co-workers, and then by her boss, to go out on the town and listen to the Academy Awards radio broadcast. The year is 1935, and “It Happened One Night” is Christine’s pick for best picture, but it’s hard to avoid interpreting this moment as a none-too-subtle wink directed at present-day moviegoers and Academy voters. Christine begs off — she just has too much work — and it goes without saying that on Feb. 22,Angelina Jolie, who plays her, will have to make similar excuses. She won’t be watching the Oscars with the likes of us; we’ll be watching her.

That seems to be the plan behind “Changeling,” at any rate, an ambition telegraphed a shade too blatantly in the many close-ups of Ms. Jolie’s extraordinary face, which is by turns tear-streaked, stoical, crestfallen and howling. To watch her trace Christine’s harrowing emotional passage — a series of flights from anxiety to terror, from grief to rage, pausing occasionally at calm defiance or tremulous hope — is to witness an undeniable tour de force of screen acting. It insists on being regarded as a great performance and may, indeed, be mistaken for one.

 

But something essential is missing, not only from her performance but also from the film as a whole. Announcing itself at the outset as “a true story” without the usual “based on” or “inspired by” hedge, “Changeling” is by turns fascinating and frustrating, emphatic and opaque. The truth about the case of Christine Collins is so shocking and dramatic that embellishment must have seemed pointless, but in sticking so close to the historical record, Mr. Straczynski and Mr. Eastwood have produced a distended, awkward narrative whose strongest themes are lost in the murky pomp of period detail.

In March 1928, Christine, a single mother living in Los Angeles, returns home from her shift supervising a busy switchboard to find that her young son, Walter (Gattlin Griffith), is missing. The initial response of the Los Angeles Police Department is casual and condescending, which turns out to be a chilly foretaste of worse treatment to follow. After a few months, with great fanfare and press coverage, the city’s hatchet-faced police chief (Colm Feore) stages a reunion between Christine and a boy who is evidently not Walter. When Christine points this out, she is treated first as a hysterical, traumatized woman and then as a lunatic and a threat to public order. She is ignored, smeared in the papers and then locked away in a mental hospital (where she meets Amy Ryan, who is to this movie more or less what Ms. Jolie was to “Girl, Interrupted”).

When it works best, “Changeling” is a feverish and bluntly effective parable of wronged innocence and unaccountable power. One after another, figures of supposedly benevolent authority — a police captain (Jeffrey Donovan), a pediatrician (Peter Gerety), a psychiatrist (Denis O’Hare) — turn out to be cruel and self-serving, and there are scenes that recall the relentless, claustrophobic sadism of “Rosemary’s Baby.” Unlike Mia Farrow’s histrionically helpless Rosemary, however, Christine has instincts that run more toward fight than flight, and she is aided in her darkest hour by a crusading Presbyterian minister (John Malkovich) and a square-jawed, patrician lawyer (Geoff Pierson).

When the focus is on Christine’s bureaucratic nightmare, Mr. Eastwood, who composed the film’s uncharacteristically intrusive score, orchestrates a steady crescendo of dread and indignation, with gothic elements lurking in the shadows of Tom Stern’s cinematography. Some of the performances — Mr. Donovan’s snappish arrogance, Mr. O’Hare’s cat-and-mouse sadism — seem overstated to the point of caricature, but to the extent that “Changeling” is a horror movie, such exaggeration makes sense.

But then, near the climax of Christine’s ordeal, another movie begins to take shape. The only decent man in the Los Angeles Police Department, a detective named Lester Ybarra (the excellent, blessedly understated Michael Kelly) begins to unravel the mystery of Walter’s disappearance. And as he does, “Changeling” itself comes unraveled. I don’t want to give too much away, but the truth is that the film spoils itself.

At around the 90-minute mark, all of the considerable tension and suspense drain away, and if the film ended at that point, you might walk away shaken and perhaps stunned. But when you look at your watch, you discover that almost an hour remains, during which the film lurches from one stagy set piece and from one genre to another, losing its focus and coherence in the process. The pervasive overacting makes less and less sense and becomes more and more annoying. There are courtroom showdowns and grisly flashbacks, prison house confrontations and further tearful reunions, as a leering serial killer (Jason Butler Harner) supplants the Los Angeles Police Department as the main source of violent, irrational depravity.

“Changeling” is especially disappointing because its basic story might have summoned forth another of Mr. Eastwood’s dark, masterly investigations of the implacability of evil and the difficulty of justice, like “Unforgiven” or “Mystic River.” But while those themes are certainly present, the director has not done much with them or succeeded in giving them dramatic shape or cinematic life. “Oscar-worthy” might turn out to be an accurate description of this baggy, grandiose movie — or, at least, of Ms. Jolie’s exhausting lead performance — but I’m afraid it would not be a compliment.

“Changeling” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has scenes of grisly violence and some profanity.

“CHANGELING”

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by J. Michael Straczynski; director of photography, Tom Stern; edited by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach; music by Mr. Eastwood; production designer, James J. Murakami; produced by Mr. Eastwood, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Robert Lorenz; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

 

IN THEATERS 24th OCTOBER, 2008

A CLINT EASTWOOD FILM

STORY -IMAGE -TRAILER

Changeling is an upcoming American period thriller set for release in 2008. The film is set in 1920s Los Angeles and is loosely based upon the real-life Wineville Chicken Murders. It tells of a woman who comes to suspect that the son returned to her after a kidnapping is not her own. It was directed by Clint Eastwood and written by J. Michael Straczynski. The film was produced by Imagine Entertainment and Malpaso Productions for Universal Pictures. Ron Howard was originally slated to direct, but scheduling difficulties and Universal’s desire to fast track the project led to his replacement by Eastwood.

Angelina Jolie stars in the lead role with support from John Malkovich, Geoff Pierson, Jeffrey Donovan, Jason Butler Harner, Colm Feore, Amy Ryan and Michael Kelly. Principal photography began on October 15 2007 and was completed in November 2007. Changeling is scheduled for general release in North America on October 31 2008 after a limited release beginning on October 24 2008. It premiered in competition at the 61st Cannes Film Festival on May 20 2008, where it received positive reviews. It appeared at the 34th Deauville American Film Festival, held September 5–14, and will have its North American premiere on October 4 2008 as the centrepiece of the 46th New York Film Festival, held September 26–October 12 2008, screening at the Ziegfeld Theatre.

 

PREMISE

Angelina Jolie and Clint Eastwood hold court at a press conference in Cannes for the premiere of “The Exchange”

The film’s screening at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival was met by “rave” reviews, prompting speculation it could be awarded the Palme d’Or .Damon Wise of Empire called the film “flawless”, and Todd McCarthy of Variety said Changeling was “Emotionally powerful and stylistically sure-handed”. He called it a “thematic companion piece” to Mystic River, but said it was “more complex and far-reaching” than Eastwood’s previous entry at the festival in 2003. McCarthy praised Jolie’s performance in the lead role as “top-notch”, saying her performance “hits home” more directly than in A Mighty Heart (2007) due to the absence of affectation. He also said the film offered “a wealth of sterling supporting turns”, praising Michael Kelly’s performance in particular. McCarthy expressed admiration for Straczynski’s “outstanding” script, which he said had “deceptive simplicity and ambition to it”, and he praised Eastwood’s direction, which he said honored the script by “underplaying the melodrama and not signaling the story’s eventual dimensions at the outset”. He said, “The characters and sociopolitical elements are introduced with almost breathtaking deliberation, as dramatic force and artistic substance steadily mount” and that “In the end, Changeling joins the likes of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential as a sorrowful critique of the city’s political culture.”

Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter said Changeling put aside romantic ideas of a 1920s Los Angeles being a more innocent period, saying the film portrayed a city “awash in corruption and steeped in a culture that treats women as hysterical and unreliable beings when they challenge male wisdom”. He said the story “adds a forgotten chapter to the L.A. noir of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential“. Honeycutt wrote that due to the film’s close adherence to the true-life facts of the case, the drama sagged momentarily at one point, but that “Straczynski and Eastwood are good at cutting to the chase. Seldom does a 141-minute movie feel this short”. Honeycutt praised Jolie’s performance, saying she “completely shuns her movie star image” and “can appear vulnerable and steadfast in the same moment… She reminds us that there is nothing so fierce as a mother protecting her cub”. He said the supporting characters (with the exception of Amy Ryan’s) “tend toward righteousness or badness without too many shades in between”. Honeycutt had praise for Eastwood’s “melodic” score that “evokes not only a period but also the mood of a city… undergoing galvanic changes” and that “the small-town feel to the street and sets, seeming oh-so-quaint to modern eyes, captures a society resistant to seeing what is really going on”.

Oliver Séguret of Libération said the cast was the best part of the film. He had praise for the “magnetic” performances of the supporting actors and called Jolie “intense but discreet… beautiful but never dazzling”. Séguret noted that instead of being a moving family drama, the film largely stayed outside this framework to concentrate on a portrait of a corrupt city. He said that while Changeling had no obvious defects, it was “perplexing” that other critics had such effusive praise for the film. He said that while Eastwood proved he was a capable director, and that he presented a solid recreation of the era, he never felt the director was inspired by the challenge the reconstruction posed. Séguret noted that Eastwood kept the story going like “smouldering embers”, but that it seldom burst into flames. He said the effect was like placing the viewer in the position of a passenger in a limousine with all the options and air conditioning: comfortable but a little boring.

CANNES 2008

Competition at the 61st Cannes Film Festival on May 20 2008

In the past five years Mr. Eastwood has enabled more first-rate, laurel-worthy acting than just about any other American filmmaker. There was Ken Watanabe in “Letters From Iwo Jima”; Ryan Philippe in “Flags of Our Fathers”; Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman (and Mr. Eastwood himself) in “Million Dollar Baby”; everybody in “Mystic River.” All of these actors, taking advantage of the director’s famously efficient, low-stress approach, were able to stretch out in the zone between realism and melodrama, to explore their characters’ raw nerves, tender spots and psychic calluses.

Ms. Jolie, in contrast, hurtles through “Changeling” as if it were the latest installment in the Lara Croft action franchise, sustaining a pitch of intensity that turns Christine at once into a vivid icon of suffering and something of a blur. The character, as imagined in J. Michael Straczynski’s script, is as flat as a nickel. Each side is stamped with the likeness of a familiar movie archetype,  victim of circumstance on one, crusader against injustice on the other , and Ms. Jolie composes her features and adjusts her voice accordingly when it comes time to flip.

    

 

WITH:

Angelina Jolie (Christine Collins),

John Malkovich (the Rev. Gustav Briegleb),

 Jeffrey Donovan (Capt. J. J. Jones),

Michael Kelly (Detective Lester Ybarra),

 Colm Feore (Chief James E. Davis),

Jason Butler Harner (Gordon Northcott),

 Amy Ryan (Carol Dexter),

Geoff Pierson (S. S. Hahn),

Denis O’Hare (Dr. Jonathan Steele),

Frank Wood (Ben Harris),

Peter Gerety (Dr. Earl W. Tarr),

Gattlin Griffith (Walter Collins)

and

 Devon Conti (Arthur Hutchins).