A Seamlessly Persuasive Success of One Rivetingly Acted, Written, Shot and Edited Scene After Another

Rating: 8/10 (11 November 2008)

This brooding film may not acquire as much credit as it should for the same reason that many films with flawlessly attractive stars do not. Angelina Jolie plays a single mother in 1928 Los Angeles who returns home from her job as a telephone operator one day to discover that her nine-year-old son Walter has disappeared. She has no idea why or how. All she knows is that the last thing she said to him was that she promised that tomorrow they will go to the movies. There is a powerful maternal instinct in Jolie which fuels her performance as a woman who goes through so much. She has a look that does not only evoke glamour and sexiness, but also a relative familiarity with the film's time period. Jolie puts on a powerful emotional display as a tenacious woman who gathers strength from the forces that oppose her. She reminds us that there is nothing so fierce as a mother protecting her cub. She inhabits this woman so deeply and persuasively that the camera is hardly conscious of Angelina Jolie, superstar and Goodwill Ambassador. But then again, there is no actor in this film that is anything but entirely convincing. And then, the camera has the same effect, and we are completely absorbed. And angry.
Changeling opens as a typical story of a missing child, but it fundamentally stays outside the structure of a family drama to focus on a portrayal of a woman whose self-determination is seen as a menace to a male-dominated culture. The time and place are sketched as a city that acts towards women as if they are out of control, and defective when they have reservations about the reasoning of men. An assessment that the film has therefore been subject to sexist contempt derives contrast with that aimed at the women of this heavily engrossing drama's 1920s setting, suggesting maybe that attitudes towards independent, career-minded women have yet to entirely disappear in the prevailing years. Our protagonist challenges male-bred social beliefs and pays for it.
Screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski carefully chooses not to crack down on the atrocious events involved in the story, favoring to tell it from Jolie's outlook. He sticks close to the facts of the case, something I wish more docudramas would do, because if the story is worth telling, it is bizarre enough that supplementing it with too many dramatized or fictitious aspects would call into doubt its reliability. There is just a handful of points at which, due to the lack of information, dramatization is necessary. But I am adamant that one does not read too much about this film before seeing it. Walk into the theater without any knowledge as to what happens. You know about Jolie's character and you know that her son goes missing. That is too much. Let the film take you on its journey in much the same way it takes her. The experience without preconception is that much more absorbing.
Eastwood and Straszynski's seamless succession of one rivetingly acted, written, shot and edited scene after another puts on view that psychiatry became a device in the gender politics of the time, no more than a few years after women's suffrage was guaranteed. While women were no longer second class citizens, further upholding their individualism, mental institutions turned out to be major means utilized by the male establishment to lead to female disempowerment.
As a director, Eastwood's continually been a classicist captivated by the decay beneath legends, and his films proliferate in a country's ethical drawbacks, in its outlook on a system's refusal to admit to its blunders, his latest film appears more densely linked to the War on Terror than his openly anti-war films. There is ample material for an analysis of maternal-spiritual displacement, though Jonathan Glazer's Birth never gave into elementary melodrama.
Eastwood uses a subdued color palette to evoke feelings of security and contentment which incapacitated the movement toward equality throughout the former half of the 20th century. The closing shot in the film is a three-minute take in which Jolie walks off to ultimately grow to be lost in the crowded street. The camera pans upwards to show miles of city blocks, people walking the streets, cars passing and streetcars along tracks. The amount of visual effects, technical logistics and creative cinematography and production design all of this took must have been grueling, but to us, it is simply the atmosphere taken into the periphery of the experience.