After five long months, a mother is reunited with his missing son at a train station. One look is all it takes for her to realize that the child returned is not hers. Despite her insistence, the unbelievably corrupt LAPD would rather label her delusional than to correct the mistake, even throwing her into an asylum. It sounds far-fetched, but it’s a story that happened to a Christine Collins during the Great Depression, when she came home one day from work and her son Walter was nowhere to be found. Meticulous, often frustrating and intriguing in a journalistic manner, Changeling is this year’s Zodiac, a true crime period drama more interested in the consuming obsessiveness of its investigator than the actual crime.
Following the outrageous twists and turns of Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, it might help to keep in mind that it is, 100%, a true story. You might notice that the tagline says exactly that—not “based on” or “inspired by” a true story, which is the get-out-of-jail-free card for Hollywood movies to distort truth and still sell a fantasy as one. Painstakingly recreated from newspaper articles and city documents by screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski, Changeling sticks close to the facts, almost to a fault. Because of the nature of the real case at the time, the story expands and crosses over, from the case of a missing child to the infamous Wineville Chicken Coop Murders to the general mistreatment of women in that era.
Covering a period of seven years, with the event inciting a political circus and a huge protest, the connecting line between all of these incidents is not Christine Collins herself, but rather the LAPD. It’s an entity that not only serves as Christine Collins’ foe, but also the clouding menace that causes or worsens all the sinister happenings in the story. A historical fact quickly glossed over in the film is the LAPD’s “gun squads,” police teams tasked to patrol the city and kill every criminal they see without mercy. Though this gun squad is seemingly unrelated to the case being discussed, it’s indicative of the gangster-outfit mentality adopted by the LAPD at the time, which allowed for the events to occur. Changeling is a movie that asks, through the Walter Collins case, “How does a city feel safe from despicable acts when their protectors aren’t serving nor protecting them?”
Angelina Jolie, as Collins, gives a strong performance that consists mostly of crying and looking displaced. It’s the main criticism that she endured when she starred in A Mighty Heart—though here the hysterics is much more subdued—but Collins’ stint in the nuthouse nearly counters that criticism with a speech by a fellow patient (a fantastic-as-always Amy Ryan) on how people would rather look over a problem than deal with a hysterical female, suggesting that an appropriate response could be considered over-the-top simply because it's a woman making a fuss. In her days there, Collins met sane or formerly sane women who were admitted by the police simply because they’ve proved to be a nuisance to the men they were involved with, all of whom were—surprise—cops.
Eastwood is a director who trusts a screenplay completely, shooting it as it is without trying to insert more that isn’t already presented in the text. His camera is like an extension of his emotions. When a mother cries, it lingers on her like sympathetic eyes, not knowing when to turn away; when a bastard gets his punishment, it stays close to him, capturing his every death twitch to savor the suffering.
Slightly contradicting that humanistic style, Straczynski doesn’t give any gray area to any of the characters. Jolie’s Christine Collins is a saint, who stays patient and polite even when Police Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) is accusing her of being an unfit mother. The good guys are heroic and altruistic, while the bad guys are irredeemably evil or corrupt. It makes it easy to have one too many predictable moments meant to bait cheers from the audience (and boy, did the audience I saw it with cheer), like when Collins tells the Evil Doctor in charge of the nuthouse to go f-ck himself. It’s a very artificial moment, not unlike the last 30 minutes or so of this movie. It's one pandering cheerfest after another, too satisfactory for such a dark and tragic story.
Like most true crime stories, there’s a certain ambiguity due to the unsolved mystery of the real case. Changeling is an exhaustingly comprehensive movie, and though it doesn’t feel complete at the end, it's a fascinating and very well-acted recreation of a bizarre period in Los Angeles’ history.
TrackBack URI for this entry
