Changeling
Movie Review
"Changeling"
Review by Eric D. Snider
Grade: C
Rating: R
Released: Friday, October 31, 2008
Directed by:
Cast:
One thing you should not do before seeing "Changeling" is Google the real-life story it's based on. Knowing the essentials of the plot would ruin the movie, which relies on surprising you -- at least for the first 75 minutes -- with how crazy it is. I knew nothing about the case beforehand and still found the film barely tolerable. I can only imagine how much duller it would have seemed if I'd already known the outcome.
Clint Eastwood is the director and Angelina Jolie is the star, and both have seen better days. Jolie plays Christine Collins, a telephone operator in Los Angeles in 1928. A single mother, Christine dotes on her 9-year-old son, Walter (Gattlin Griffith), and is devastated when he goes missing one March afternoon and cannot be found.
Five months later, the police locate Walter in Illinois and bring him home by train to a great fanfare of much-needed positive publicity for the LAPD. There's just one problem: This boy isn't Walter. He says he is, but surely a mother knows her own son. This ain't him. But the LAPD, represented by Capt. J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), who speaks in the rapid-fire patter of an old-fashioned movie gangster, is more interested in closing the case than actually solving it. "You're a liar and a troublemaker," Jones tells Christine.
It is clear to us, the audience, that Christine is correct. She gets Walter's dentist and schoolteacher to verify that this boy is not him. Jones' response is to throw Christine into the loony bin, which was evidently quite easy for a cop to do in L.A. in the 1920s. And unfortunately, if the police say you're crazy, you're crazy. As one of Christine's fellow prisoners tells her, "The more you try to seem sane, the crazier you start to look."
Being in a mental institution did Oscar-flavored wonders for Jolie in "Girl, Interrupted," and there's plenty of frustrating, why-won't-they-listen-to-her, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"-style drama to be had here. Meanwhile, back on the outside, a good cop named Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly), is learning the truth and ruining the movie.
The film is 141 minutes long, you see, and we're at about the halfway point when Ybarra and the audience discover all the answers about what happened to Walter. At that point, it's just a matter of filling in the minor details and letting the story play out -- which it does in a disappointingly perfunctory, not to mention dragged-out, fashion. It's a crime film for a while, and then it's a community-activist film, as Christine protests the LAPD's treatment of her, aided by a rabble-rousing Presbyterian minister played by John Malkovich.
Jolie's performance is good, but it's a thankless role that only requires her to cry for her son for 2 1/2 hours -- a repeat, more or less, of what she did in last year's "A Mighty Heart." Though we can sympathize with her, it's hard to truly like a character who's so single-minded and without nuance.
What the film does (with a screenplay is by TV writer and "Babylon 5" creator J. Michael Straczynski) is set up easy villains and then knock 'em down. Corrupt cops, shady city officials, deranged criminals -- even accepting that the basic facts of the film are true, all the realism has been drained in order to make a populist, yay-for-heroes, boo-for-villains story. It's the kind of movie where the mayor tells his chief of police, "This is an election year! I can't afford this kind of press!" How could a story as genuinely bizarre as this one seem so generic and rambling on the screen?
Grade: C
Rated R, three F-words, brief strong violence
2 hrs., 21 min.
Copyright © Eric D. Snider.
This work may not be transmitted via the Internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without written consent from Eric D. Snider.
This item has 10 comments
November 1, 2008 at 1:32 am
"One thing you should not do before seeing "Changeling" is Google the real-life story it's based on."
Whoops, too late. Guess I don't need to see this one now, eh?
November 3, 2008 at 5:47 am
Wow, this is the first time I genuinely disagree with you. Is there a measure of politics behind the mixed reviews? Because it's been overwhelmingly loved by viewers. I can't see how this movie can't be nominated for Best Picture? If anything, Eastwood shows remarkable restraint because he could have gone the way of "A Beautiful Mind" and completely manipulated you to a river a tears. The movie was genuinely moving and beautifully directed and acted. As we were leaving the theater here in NYC, I heard a couple say "This is the best movie I've seen in a long time," and then the husband made a comment about how awesome Eastwood is. Have to agree. It's better than Million Dollar Baby but not quite Mystic River.
I'm surprised you followed the sheep on this one. In any case, I almost always agree with you so this won't scare me away.
November 4, 2008 at 6:26 am
"I'm surprised you followed the sheep on this one."
Well, you say that the film has been overwhelmingly loved by viewers, and you liked it, so doesn't that make you a sheep?
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OR - perhaps people (including critics) actually do form their own opinions, and Eric genuinely wasn't in love with the film. Maybe.
November 7, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Thanks for that knee-jerk Timothy.
I had low expectations going into this movie considering the mediocre reviews. I really enjoyed the movie and THEN found out that most other people did as well.
If I wanted to like a movie just because everyone else did, I would have liked the average Burn Before Reading. Then again, comedy is ONE genre you never trust critics with.
November 10, 2008 at 6:24 am
I enjoyed this movie too. I did feel that sometimes it kind of ran off track a little, but then it pulled back. It's a long movie, but worth the wait.
November 12, 2008 at 5:52 pm
I have to strongly disagree with this review, and I usually agree with Eric on a lot of them. I loved this movie and I thought Clint Eastwood did a great job of directing. The film made me uncomfortable through a lot of it just thinking about the psychological hell many of the characters were going through, and I think that was his intention.
PS whats up with having to go to outside websites to read the reviews, whats the point of even having this site anymore? Lame-O
November 20, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Just guessing, but the "Lame-O" requirement to read some movie reviews on outside websites may have something to do with the fact that Eric gets paid to write those reviews… His employers are probably more interested in increasing traffic to their own websites than in supporting ericdsnider.com, the lousy capitalists!
November 29, 2008 at 2:59 pm
+++POSSIBLE SPOILERS***
I have not seen the movie NOR read this review before now, BUT the film has just been released in the UK and no less a personage than A.S. Byatt was one of the guests discussing it on this week's Saturday Review (BBC Radio 4) show. She felt that the psychology of Angelina Jolie's character was all wrong. Even though she left her boy alone (even if she "had to") she was not particularly afflicted with guilt at his disappearance. She was seemingly popular at work & yet also seemed to have no friends to support her in her crisis.
Another critic on the show said he was tired of seeing electro-shock therapy being portrayed as an instrument of torture. They all said it went on far too long.
AND since they had obviousky googled the case notes ahead of time, they wondered at Eastwood's changing the fact that in real life it was the serial killer's MOTHER who was his "enabler" -- not another boy leading his fellows to the slaughter. Does Eastwood think there's room for only one sort of mother in his tale?
Anyhow, I'll take A.S. Byatt's (and Eric's) advice and give it a miss. . .
November 29, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Another thing from the BBC Radio 4 discussion: do you ever learn WHY the substituted boy agreed to go along with all the lies? Is HE just EVIL to put a mother through that? And if she knows he's NOT her son, does she wonder where HIS mother is? Does she make any attempt to find out? Does ANY of this story make any sense?? ("True" or not.)
January 19, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Such a nice review! Although I don't agree with everything you said, I love the way you expressed your opinion. This movie wasn't perfect, indeed it was quite flawed in many aspects, but there was something about it that left me breathless by the time the credits started rolling. And I'm not easily impressed! This was a trademark Clint Eastwood film, but I felt it was very different from his other works such as Million Dollar Baby. For once, I had no problem with Angelina Jolie's acting - so powerful yet understated - although her character was too saintly for my taste. Finally, Hollywood did something right!
Above all, it was the story that had the biggest impact on me, and I hope I can find a movie or book as good as Changeling. I know what you mean when you say people shouldn't read about the real story that this movie is based on.
If you’re a fan of the movie Changeling and want to know the backstory of Sanford Clark and Gordon Northcott, I just learned that writer Anthony Flacco has a publishing deal with Sterling for The Road Out of Hell: Sanford Clark and the True Story of the Wineville Murders. It’s being described as a psychological thriller written in cooperation with the adult living son of Sanford Clark. The book, I’m told, will be out in Fall ’09.