Review: Changeling

Single mum and 1920s phone operator Angelina Jolie’s 9 year-old son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) disappears suddenly, and the film follows her quest to find her son, amidst the shockingly corrupt practices and incompetent bungling of the LAPD (headed by the corrupt Colm Feore and his callous Captain Martin Donovan, who months after Walter’s disappearance, produces a boy he claims is Walter, and the publicity seeking LAPD make a big hoopla about the mother-son reunion. Problem is, he’s shorter, has different dental records, and is not recognised by his teacher. Oh, and his mother says the kid isn’t hers. But the patronising and heartless Donovan (interested in not having the LAPD’s increasingly dubious reputation further sullied) just says that’s kooky talk and after she embarrasses the cops by going to the press, Donovan organises to have Jolie committed to an insane asylum (Doesn’t Jolie have any friends or family who can back her up? Seems odd). Nah, a mother wouldn’t recognise her own son, y’all know how women are! But her cause is picked up by crusading radio preacher John Malkovich (doing the humourless, ranting self-righteousness crusader of ‘the people’ thing rather well), who rallies against police corruption, and then there’s the one good cop (Michael Kelly) who is investigating a serial killer case that may have some connection. Geoff Pierson plays Jolie’s high profile lawyer, Jason Butler Harner plays a slimy nutjob whom Kelly runs into, and Amy Ryan a clichéd tough asylum inmate.

 

This 2008 Clint Eastwood (“White Hunter, Black Heart”, “Play Misty For Me”, “Million Dollar Baby”, “Mystic River”, “Hereafter”) film never seems to settle on a genre. Is it a heart-tugging real-life drama about a distraught mother and her missing kid? A condemnation of police corruption? Or a serial killer flick? Well, it’s all three, and the only genre that it seems to succeed in is the third one, thanks to a sometimes hammy but genuinely unsettling turn by Harner as a truly pathetic killer. But sadly, that’s only in the film’s final stages, despite being fascinating enough to warrant its own movie. Before that we have to witness a hard-working but unconvincing and dull Jolie (she sure plays the whole screaming, teary-eyed ‘Gimme back my son!’ scene for all the over-emoting it’s worth and tries gallantly to be mousy the rest of the time) attempting to play a 1920s mother and telephone operator (nice period detail, though), and a tale of police corruption that would seem absolutely laughable if you weren’t aware that it was based on fact. The nadir is when the boo-hiss Donovan has Jolie committed to a mental asylum straight out of 1940s melodrama! It’s just so one-sided and the cop characters (save Kelly’s dogged, crusading detective) might as well have twirling moustaches and dunces caps for all of their Machiavellian scheming and procedural incompetence. I didn’t buy Jolie (despite her being a mother in real-life and earning an Oscar nom here. Jennifer Connelly would’ve owned this). I also didn’t buy the circumstances for much the same reasons I never bought the slightly similar real-life inspired “Sommersby” (it’s just such a stupid idea to ask us to accept, real or not), and ultimately the film just didn’t work for me much. I kept saying ‘Oh come on’ at every turn, and it also seems to go on and on a bit. But like I said, Harner’s excellent, Malkovich is impassioned (but underused) in a rare good guy part, and Pierson has a good scene or two. The contrived screenplay is by J. Michael Straczynski, strangely enough the creator of TV’s cultish sci-fi show “Babylon 5” (and a veteran TV writer making his film debut to boot). Not one of Clint’s finest hours, I’m afraid, but hey, it ain’t “Heartbreak Ridge” or “The Rookie”, either.

 

Rating: C+