Boy, Interrupted  'Changeling' Review

Rating: 9/10 (14 February 2009)

During John Malkovich's first speech as Reverend Gustav Briegleb near the beginning of Changeling, his vicious indictment of the Los Angeles Police Department in front of his church congregation made me feel that the movie was going to be something of a scathing criticism of the LAPD, which is not exactly what I expected. I like to go into Clint Eastwood films knowing as little as possible about them, because the element of surprise has added a great deal to my experience of brilliant films like Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River, and True Crime, to which Changeling bears undeniable resemblance.
Angelina Jolie stars in the true story about Christine Collins, whose 9-year-old son went mysteriously missing without the slightest trace in March 1928. Five months later, she received a visit from a police investigator giving her the news that she had been praying for all this time, her son was alive and well and on his way back to her.
Upon being reunited, however, she insists immediately that the boy they bring is not hers, even though he bears close resemblance to her son and, most importantly, he says his name is Walter Collins and yes, she is his mother. He runs into her arms in front of the newspaper photographers' cameras, and her life takes a bizarre and frightening turn.
What follows is a brilliantly paced battle between Christine, who insists the boy is not hers, the LAPD, who have maneuvered the case as an example of their good work amidst public accusations of corruption and violence, and the Reverend Briegleb, a Presbyterian pastor determined to use his radio broadcasts to reveal the extensive criminal underworld operating within the LAPD.
The movie tells the story not only of a time when violence and corruption flowed unchecked within a major metropolitan police force, but also of a time when women enjoyed a level in society distantly below the early 21st century. You know, I live in China and the Chinese like to cover up embarrassing moments in their history (it's illegal to print or buy books detailing the events of the Tiananmen Square Massacre anywhere in mainland China, as one tiny example), thinking that those moments make the government look bad. They have convinced the people that they "don't need to know what happened," in order to maintain public approval of the government's workings.
But when I hear stories like the one told in Changeling, or when I see films or read books or learn about the history of slavery of the violence that was inflicted upon the Native Americans when the first Americans arrived from Europe, it makes me so proud that America was so brutal and so dangerous and so barbaric because I look around me now and see how far we've come. In 1928, it was possible for the Los Angeles Police to tell a woman to her face, and all over the newspapers, that she couldn't even recognize her own son. People believed the police instead of a mother, which is an astonishing example of how different American society was.
Initially, the deepest part of the mystery is where this new boy came from. He is given darkly mysterious origins. We see a scene where a boy and a sweaty farmer are eating lunch in a dingy country café. The farmer says he's forgotten his wallet and will return home to get it, and the man working in the café threatens to call the police if he's not back within ten minutes. The farmer leaves his son as collateral, and the man waits nearly an hour before giving in and finally calling the police. Soon, the boy is given to Christine Collins as her son. The answer to this mystery is, however, one of the film's few weak spots.
Events spiral out of control with the LAPD gradually pulling out all the stops in ending Christine's protests until she is briskly locked away in a mental institution, where she discovers that the place is populated with other women who somehow publicly annoyed the police. The movie has no mercy on the embarrassing past of the LAPD. As Christine languishes amidst the screams and forced medication in the mental hospital, a determined detective, LAPD detective, by disobeying orders, discovers the horrific series of murders of young boys at a chicken ranch outside Winesville, California.
Changeling is based on a true story, although the story of the murders committed by Gordon Northcott definitely seem to awful to be true, especially given the involvement of another young boy, who helped him attract and then imprison and even kill kids his own age so that he could stay in America. Is Canada really that bad?
In the story of Northcott's pursuit and ultimate fate, it's impossible not to remember Eastwood's stunning crime drama True Crime, which also dealt with themes of police fallibility and the power of one man's determination. Jason Butler Harner's performance as Northcott is the most powerful and important performance in the story. If he had gotten one tic, one single detail not perfectly right, the whole character would have fallen apart into a cartoonish caricature of your standard serial killer. But he's real and he gets under your skin. We never learn much about his childhood or what made him what he is, but it's good that we don't because Eastwood understands that that would have been a waste of screen time. The story is, after all, not about him.
The movie spectacularly re-creates late 1920s Los Angeles, and never for one second loses its authentic feel and sense of character and style. The Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography Oscar nominations are richly deserved. 2008 has been a year of profoundly important and well-made docudramas and crime thrillers about American politics and history, and Changeling ranks up there just below Frost/Nixon and Milk.