Pretty good, but not Eastwood's best

Rating: 7/10 (3 November 2008)

On it's face, "Changeling" is a story well told and pretty well researched. Although based on fact, there are the obligatory "artistic licenses" taken. Until I did some research on the actual case, I didn't realize the changes, and when I did know, it didn't seem particularly detrimental to the overall story.
However, there were a lot of little nagging errors in perspective, time-line, etc. that I found annoying. Of course, my wife just rolls her eyes and tells me I'm WAY too critical in that perspective. Without trying to spoil it too bad, some of my nits were:

At the beginning of the film, Christine & Walter are discussing what happened to his father, something that only the real kid could know. Never heard about it again.

When she left for work the day he was kidnapped, she mentions that the neighbor would be checking in on him to make sure he was fine. Yet when she found him missing when returning home, the neighbor is never mentioned. I don't know about others, but the FIRST place I would go in that situation would be to that person to find out when (or if) she last saw the child.

At the end, when the boy who escaped returns home in 1935, he looks no more than 14 or 15. HOWEVER, in the flashback to 1928 during the kidnapping, the boy looks about 10 or 11, clearly one of the older boys (who were shown as being 9 or 10). Unless he was extraordinarily big for his age at 10 and didn't continue to grow, he looked all wrong.

There were the usual goofs (Angelina Jolie sitting on one side of the street car then the next scene showing her face against the window on the OTHER side of the street car), but I found the unused clues to be sloppy film making.