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The most disturbing stories are the true ones
Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” an occasionally flawed historical masterpiece
By Alex Rewey
Eastwood pulls no punches in conveying much of the period’s condescending attitudes toward women to a frustrating degree.
It must be hard to tell Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood how to make movies. As a last-minute studio replacement to fast-track the originally Ron Howard helmed historical epic “Changeling,” the briskly economical (yet immensely talented) Eastwood took over, telling in gut-wrenchingly simple terms, what is perhaps one of the most outrageous stories to ever come out of the Los Angeles Police Department's many historical disgraces.
Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie plays the real-life single mother Christine Collins, who tries desperately to balance her full-time job as a telephone operator and the raising of six-year-old Walter in 1920s Los Angeles.
Coming home late one night Christine finds, to every parent’s horror, that Walter has suddenly disappeared. After frantically searching the neighborhood and contacting local and regional authorities, Collins finds no trace of her boy.
Nearly five months later, the LAPD’s juvenile division, headed up by the stubbornly arrogant Capt. J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), contacts the understandably distressed Collins alerting her to the discovery of her son, found many states away.
However, when her “son” arrives in LA, the reunion is anything but a celebratory occasion. While Jones and the LAPD insist the discovered boy is in fact Collins’ son, she ardently disagrees.
What follows is easily one of the darkest chapters in the history of the LAPD’s stunning abuse of power and general callousness in its infancy.
Eastwood pulls no punches in conveying much of the period’s condescending attitudes toward women to a frustrating degree. Donovan, shedding his comparatively nice guy image from USA’s “Burn Notice,” delivers a formidable, albeit occasionally stiff, performance as the quintessential summation of the immense gender stumbling blocks facing Collins at the time.
Yet this also presents some of the film's almost laughably heavy-handed scenes.
As the film begins to descend into the paralyzingly maudlin (including a heartbreakingly painful scene reminiscent of “Girl, Interrupted,” where Collins desperately attempts to give the so-called “right answers” to a doctor of the Women’s Psyche Ward, a veritably detestable dumping ground for police-designated “problem women”) early audience members could be clearly heard laughing and yelling at the characters onscreen.
Curiously championing Collins’ cause is the fervently anti-authoritarian Reverend Gustav Briegleb, played by the rather underutilized John Malkovich. While Malkovich gives a characteristically strong performance, he appears merely in place to educate audiences on the severity of the LAPD’s historical transgressions.
Even among the film’s more frustratingly dated moments, Eastwood deserves praise for bringing 1920 Los Angeles to the big screen with truly stunning detail and equally unnerving realism. While Eastwood presents staggering city shots of what was even than a rough-and-tumble town, he also dwells quite rightly in some of the more barbaric elements of the period.
Collins’ stint in the pre-Nellie Bly, turn of the century psych ward is nothing short of shocking. At the same time, the film’s most gruesome scene, surrounding a San Quentin Prison execution, has been described by some critics as nearly unwatchable. In a number of subsequent press interviews, Eastwood defended his decision for including such a graphic, historically accurate presentation, stating he intended to deliver the kind of reality that is sometimes glazed over in contemporary retellings of true stories.
Nevertheless, throughout the film’s nearly two-and-a-half-hour run time, the pacing of the film appears less than polished. Penned by “Amazing Spider-Man” author J. Michael Straczynski, also known for his work in television, such as “Babylon 5” and the 1980s re-launch of “The Twilight Zone,” “Changeling” maintains a decidedly episodic feel.
Nowhere is this more apparent than the film’s handful of “Return of the King” style false endings in the fourth and fifth acts, which attempt to thoroughly explain the entirety of Collins’ ordeal.
Despite a few overconfident directorial flaws, “Changeling” could hardly be considered a bad movie. As Eastwood himself attested to in an interview with Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show,” Collins’ true life story is simply too compelling to have been untold as long as it has.
While the film itself is undoubtedly challenging, the persistently nagging aspect lies its film’s historical truth.
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