jaw-dropping true story

Rating: 8/10 (16 November 2008)

If "Changeling" didn't tell us right up front that it was based on a true story, one might be easily forgiven for dismissing it as nothing more than far-fetched and implausible melodrama. But since truth so often IS stranger than fiction, we can but sit back in openmouthed disbelief as this most bizarre of bizarre scenarios unfolds before us.
Angelina Jolie plays Christine Collins, a single mother living with her nine-year-old son, Walter, in 1928 Los Angeles. When Walter goes missing one day, the frantic mother pleads with the police to find him. After five long months of grueling suspense, Christine is finally reunited with her child. Or is she? For while the police, eager to close the case for publicity purposes, insist that the boy they've found is indeed her missing son, Christine knows otherwise and spends the next few months attempting to convince anyone who'll listen that her real son is still out there somewhere and that the boy living with her is an imposter. John Malkovich co-stars as a crusading radio preacher who takes up the cause of this understandably distraught mother against the increasingly disreputable and malicious LAPD.
Written by J. Michael Straczynski and directed by Clint Eastwood (who also wrote the musical score), "Changeling" is a gripping human drama that keeps us on tenterhooks every step of its narrative-shifting way. Going well beyond the surface fascinations of the plot, the movie broadens out to become a compelling study of police corruption and of one woman's battle for justice against a totalitarian, bureaucratic system. Throughout, the audience is buffeted back and forth between utter frustration and heartwarming uplift and just about every other emotion in between. It's true that the movie does have a few too many false climaxes towards the end and there are individual moments when it veers dangerously close to exploitation, but, for the most part, this is a first-rate, riveting drama, solidly directed by Eastwood and beautifully acted by Jolie, Malkovich, Michael Kelly, Jeffrey Donovan, Amy Ryan and many others.
Director Eastwood triumphs again.