Real life is full of stories so extraordinary and unbelievable that they look as though they could exist only as Hollywood films. Yet, when such stories are actually brought to the screen as Hollywood films, they usually turn out underwhelming, even with significant resources and talents being invested in their telling. An interesting example of this frustrating paradox can be found in Changeling, the 2008 period drama directed by Clint Eastwood.
The plot begins roughly a century ago, in 1928 Los Angeles. The protagonist, played by Angelina Jolie, is Christine Collins, a single mother who returns home one day to find her nine-year-old son Walter missing. She reports the disappearance to the LAPD, which proves unable to find the boy. Some in the city public, most notably Reverend Gustav Briegleb (played by John Malkovich), take up Christine's cause and criticise the LAPD, an organisation notorious for corruption and police brutality. For this reason, LAPD Chief James E. Davies (played by Colm Feore) is much relieved when the news comes that Walter has been found in DeKalb, Illinois. Yet the widely publicised reunion between the boy and his mother turns into a PR disaster when Christine claims that the boy is not Walter.
The LAPD, however, insists that the case is closed. Captain J. J. Jones (played by Jeffrey Donovan), head of the Juvenile Division, forces Christine to take the boy "on a trial basis." When she insists on differences in height, stature, dental records, and the fact that her son, unlike the boy brought to her home, was uncircumcised, her claims are dismissed. The LAPD then launches a campaign in the friendly press to describe Christine as an "unfit mother" before having her committed to a psychiatric hospital, where Dr. Jonathan Steele (played by Denis O'Hare) tells her that he would release her only if she signs a statement acknowledging the return of her son.
The actual truth is revealed a few months later during a US Immigration Service raid on a ranch in nearby Riverside County, where authorities, represented by Detective Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly) arrest a fifteen-year-old Canadian national, Sanford Wesley Clark (Eddie Alderson), whilst his uncle Gordon Stewart Northcott (Jason Butler Harner) flees. Clark reveals that Northcott has abducted, abused, and murdered twenty young boys, including Walter Collins. Hearing about this, the famous attorney Sammy "S.S." Hahn (Geoff Pierson) takes Christine's case and has her released. The boy who was brought to Christine's custody admits that his real name is Arthur Hutchens, and that he was a runaway, lying in order to come to California and see Hollywood stars. Northcott is arrested in British Columbia, extradited, and sentenced to death for his crimes. He asks Christine to visit him before his execution, but fails to admit killing Walter. In 1935, David Clay, one of the boys assumed to be among Northcott's victims, is found alive and tells that he and Walter escaped Northcott's ranch together. Yet Walter Collins is never found, and his fate is probably never established.
The main creative force behind the film was J. M. Straczynski, a writer best known for his work on television, including the creation of the popular sci-fi series Babylon 5. Straczynski, after almost two decades working in television, wanted to try his hand at feature films. In 2006, he stumbled by accident upon some Los Angeles city records and became convinced that the unbelievable story featured in them would serve as an excellent basis for a feature film. Ron Howard, who was originally slated to direct, had to give the directorial reins to Clint Eastwood.
Eastwood was the right choice to direct this film, partly because, as one of the last Hollywood directors of his generation, he was able to recreate 1930s California from personal experience. The film is thematically very close to his earlier and much more celebrated work Mystic River. Just as that film explored the devastating consequences of childhood trauma and the failure of institutions to protect the innocent, Changeling examines a mother's anguish and the monstrous indifference of a corrupt system. Eastwood has also put a very strong cast to good use, with reliable character actors filling even the smallest roles and lending the period reconstruction an air of authenticity.
Yet, for all of his efforts, Eastwood could not compensate for some of the issues in Straczynski's script. Straczynski tried very hard to be as faithful to historical sources as possible, but, like in any Hollywood adaptation of history, some corners had to be cut, mainly to keep the film within two and a half hours of running time, and to make a rather dark and shockingly sinister story much more palatable to a mainstream audience. The result is a script that often feels as though it is ticking boxes from a historical checklist rather than allowing the drama to breathe organically. The compression of real events into a conventional narrative structure robs the story of some of its inherent power, and the dialogue occasionally veers into exposition that would not feel out of place in a television procedural — a reminder of Straczynski's small-screen origins.
The main issue, however, is that Christine Collins, who is supposed to be the major protagonist, is played by Angelina Jolie, whose stellar presence in many ways drowns the film. She is supposed to anchor the plot, but once her ordeal leads to institutionalisation, the plot goes very much without her, and the horrific real-life case of the Wineville Chicken Coop murders gets solved through a series of happy coincidences. Jolie, an actress of undeniable charisma and intensity, brings a certain glamour to the role that sits somewhat uneasily with the working-class single mother she is meant to portray. Her performance is competent and occasionally moving, but it never quite disappears into the character in the way that, say, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins disappeared into their roles in Mystic River. There is always the sense that we are watching Angelina Jolie suffering, rather than Christine Collins. This is not entirely Jolie's fault — the script gives her little to do beyond looking stricken and dignified — but the effect is to make the film feel more like a star vehicle than a genuine character study.
Some critics praised the film for its feminist overtones, and there is undoubtedly something powerful in the depiction of a woman being pathologised and institutionalised simply for refusing to accept the word of male authority. Yet Eastwood's and Straczynski's description of the corrupt and oppressive underbelly of superficially glamorous Los Angeles pales in comparison with similar material in the noirish period reconstructions of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. Compared with them, Changeling looks technically competent but dry and uninspiring work. Eastwood's directorial style, which in Mystic River served the material well through its very plainness and lack of flourish, here feels merely flat. The period detail is meticulous, the cinematography serviceable, the score unobtrusive, but none of it coalesces into something greater than the sum of its parts. Where Chinatown used its period setting to say something profound about power and corruption in American life, and L.A. Confidential used it to craft a gripping noir narrative with genuine moral complexity, Changeling merely presents its historical facts and expects their inherent outrage to carry the film. It is not enough.
The film can still be recommended to Eastwood aficionados, and to fans of period drama or true crime, who may find the historical details and the painstaking reconstruction of 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles rewarding in themselves. But this story would be much better and more comprehensively told in the form of a documentary, where the extraordinary facts could speak for themselves without the compromises and flattening that inevitably come with Hollywood dramatisation. As it stands, Changeling is a film that one respects more than one enjoys — a well-meaning, professionally executed production that somehow fails to do full justice to a story that needed no embellishment to be devastating.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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