Clint Eastwood's new movie "Changeling" is a masterpiece of technical craftsmanship. The editing is crisp and concise. The cinematography is gorgeous. The score (composed by Eastwood himself) is full of lyrical grace. The art department's recreation of 1920s Los Angeles is the best I've seen since "Chinatown"(1974). With such immense talent on display, it's a shame that the movie itself is as dull as toast.
Well maybe that's a little unfair. A feminist period drama structured around a missing child story, "Changeling" has a lot of nice emotional moments, and the sincerity of its intentions coupled with its sterling technical attributes make me feel like a philistine for trashing it.
But neither skill nor earnestness are acceptable substitutes for good storytelling, and by that account "Changeling" comes up painfully short. Eastwood has taken a story steeped in weird psychological undertones and turned it into a solemn parable about the ills of patriarchal society. The result is a stiff, well-intended failure.
The film opens on Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a switchboard supervisor and single mom who arrives home one day to find that her nine-year-old son Walter has vanished. The LAPD, eager to regain its reputation following a recent corruption scandal, investigates the matter and eventually produces a child from Illinois who looks a lot like Walter. Trouble is, he isn't.
Christine initially allows herself to be convinced otherwise, but when she realizes the mistake and attempts to protest, things go from bad to worse. The police captain J. J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) accuses her of dereliction of motherly duty. When she persists, he has her committed to a psychopathic ward run by Dr. Jonathan Steele (Denis O'Hare), a stooge for the police department. Meanwhile, a Presbyterian minister named Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich) adopts Christine's story as a rallying cause in his social crusade against the LAPD and lobbies vigorously for her release.
The plot is based, alarmingly, on a true story. There really was a Christine Collins in 1920s Los Angeles, who lost her child and was declared insane when she recognized the replacement as a fraud. It's a strange and disturbing tale that cries out for a director unafraid of delving into its darker implications.
Eastwood, however, barely scratches the surface. Rather than attend to moments of eerie psychological tension -- Christine's growing dread as she stares at her son's doppelganger, for example -- "Changeling" focuses resolutely on the least interesting parts of the story. Nearly 30 minutes of the film's massive running time are devoted to Christine's righteous legal campaign against police corruption, complete with a few cheesy courtroom montage sequences.
It's all part of Eastwood's agenda to frame the story as a saga of empowered womanhood, sort of an "Erin Brokovich" (2000) scenario with fewer push-up bras. Over the course of the film, Christine transforms from a meek, mousy woman plagued by self-doubt to a progressive champion of civil rights. The men in the movie uniformly treat her as either a nuisance or a tool. Even the sanctimonious Reverend Briegleb is less interested in Christine as human being than as a poster girl for his anti-cop crusade.
The trouble with this approach is that, by fashioning his heroine into a noble feminist martyr, Eastwood winds up making the same mistake as his characters: He takes one look at a potentially interesting female and decides to view her solely as a mechanism for ideological persuasion. Christine spends most of the movie either sobbing or bravely fighting back tears -- she lacks any discernible human dimension beyond wounded maternal angst. Angelina Jolie is a lovely actress, but even she can't find a way to expand on Christine's limited emotional range, and her performance quickly devolves into a display of courageous sniffling.
This leaves Eastwood no choice but to fall back on his greatest strength as a director: getting all the shots right. "Changeling" is a beautifully composed movie, filmed in a palette of slate blues and pale grays, with creeping shadows masking the corners of the frame. You can sense the director straining for the unruffled grace of a 1940s melodrama, but even this attempt feels ill-advised. The story's historical facts are too sensational, and the mood of the film too repressively dour, to sustain such a serene stylistic tone. With perverse Freudian implications and a grisly subplot about a serial child-murderer, this may not be the best material to stage an homage to classic Hollywood.
In the end, "Changeling" is simply too well-made for its own good. It's a deeply unsettling story, filmed with such misguided respect for classical conventions that it loses any sense of immediacy. Scholars of filmmaking technique will recognize this movie as a shining example of near-flawless craftsmanship. Everyone else will be bored to tears.
