Review

Review Date: 2-November-08
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Junk

Changeling (2008)

Clint Eastwood has never shied away from big-ticket emotions which might easily bleed into mawkishness. He took on a notoriously sappy novel of love and adultery in The Bridges of Madison County and piled a three-hankie ending atop a rags-to-riches fairy tale in Million Dollar Baby. But he imbued these films with a stateliness that made them moving testaments to life's Big Moments. While directing Changeling this knack apparently deserted him. In this movie one aggravating or shocking event leads to another and another and another, amounting to a morass of offensive exploitation. It comes on artistically enough, with sepia cinematography and Eastwood's typical taste in music, but the trappings of class only heighten the garishness of its sensationalism.

The story itself is a tough sell, something which screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski would not have dared try to foist on the public if he had not extracted it from real life. In the late 1920s, a single mother named Christine Collins left her nine-year-old son home alone for a few hours, and when she returned he had vanished. The Los Angeles police, who were thoroughly corrupt at the time, conducted a routine search which led them to a boy traveling with a drifter in the Midwest. Looking to wrap up the case and generate some good press, one Captain Jones (here played by Jeffrey Donovan) delivered the boy to Ms. Collins in a staged homecoming. He browbeat her to choke down protestations that it was not her son and bribed or otherwise persuaded the boy and various doctors to maintain the fiction. While the movie does not explore the historical angle, I suppose Collins was a ready dupe as a working-class, unprotected female in an era when women had only recently gained the right to vote.

She was also a cross between a dishrag and a cipher if Angelina Jolie's portrayal is any indication. Over and over I found myself saying, "Oh, come ON" at her behavior, which Jolie fails to render explicable. Here is a woman poised to become a supervisor at a telephone company (no small feat at the time), and yet she cannot find her voice when some bastard shoves a boy to her bosom and tells her to pretend it's her missing son? Her situation was extreme and bizarre, and any normal person would have raised the roof at such an outrage. Why would she allow Jones to make appalling accusations to her face when he was obviously heading up a widespread scam? She was a mother for nine years and could not talk to the pint-sized impostor, whom she actually takes home, to get the truth out of him? Was there ever really a dipshit so ripe to be taken for a ride?

Soon the heroine's deficiencies take a back seat to the movie's, as the action veers to the mental ward where Collins is imprisoned and the outback lair of a serial killer (Jason Butler Harner) who enjoys the thud of a hatchet on young flesh. (Honestly, I do not understand why any parents allowed their son to appear in this picture.) It is exactly as shlocky as it sounds, with stained hospital walls, inappropriate electroshock therapy, Nurse Ratched wannabes, and bloodstained revels involving children. To make it ludicrous as well as repulsive, a hooker with a heart of gold teaches Collins to hang tough, giving Jolie the chance to appear alive for several minutes. Collins' one champion, a vaguely described preacher with a yen for justice (John Malkovich), rescues her and recruits a lawyer to help her get revenge. There follows a sequence of courtroom scenes, one against the police and one against the killer, which provide no satisfaction unless your appetite for pandering spectacle requires an execution for dessert.

There is no call for digging up a true crime just to pass off the worst of human nature as compelling history without insight into cause or character. The most distasteful two and a half hours I have ever spent, Changeling is a bad, bad movie to which no one should ever subject oneself.

Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.