Clint's best since Mystic River, and a harrowing performance from its star.

Rating: 10/10 (24 October 2008)

I saw Clint Eastwood recently on the Daily Show, and Jon Stewart brought up a point I have not read in the handful of reviews I had read before going into his latest film, Changeling. Often one sees movies about civil rights, racial or ethnic, but rarely in a well-produced Hollywood picture will the topic of the history of "hysterical" women being "dealt with" come up, of the hardships of those who could be pushed around by the (given) crooked types at the LAPD. This isn't just what Changeling is all about, either, which makes it all the more impressive how much Eastwood, via a good writer, can accomplish.
This is the kind of tremendous drama that could become daunting for any other director- any one little step one way and it could be straight-to-Lifetime glop- but the director at hand here is such a pro that he's able to put in incredible artistry at nearly every step, even when it looks as though it should be cut and dry film-making. And then there's also the cast. But first, the story, which incredibly is just "a true story" at the start, is about Christine Collins (Jolie) who is just a regular single working mother raising her boy in LA who one day comes home and finds her son is not around: missing. The cops barely do a thing until a few months later when another child who happens to be lost is picked up, instructed by the police to say that he's the Collins boy, and that this will all make sense as a happy-ending story.
This is, except for Miss Collins, who keeps asking repeatedly a very simple but quickly angered question: where is my son? This leads into two tangents as a film: the roller-coaster tumble and rise and tumble of a mother fearing life and death for her son- sometimes in a mental hospital where she's been committed by police- and of a child killer who may or may not have killed Walter Collins, along with other missing/abducted children. Each of the tangents are interwoven with tense and particularly dark and harrowing detail, and once put together form an inexorable link that becomes all the more fascinating in the kind of way that most horror movies don't reach. Truth can be stranger than fiction, but in this case it's just uglier, and with only the faintest of hope.
Which, in a sense, works to Eastwood's advantage. It'd be hard for me to imagine many other directors grappling with the facts in the case. How much Changeling sticks to the details of corruption and murder in the LAPD ranks back then (not surprising, of course, given the history of the force in reality and in cinema) or the Collins saga I can't say, but so much of the picture feels vital and without compromise to suggest that it is more than likely close to real, stark tragedy. Eastwood had that perfectly with Mystic River and somewhat in Million Dollar Baby. He gets it this time again, and applies a style that is one of his most ambitious (just on the technical side the way he and his DP desaturated the color of present-day 1928 era and of the flashbacks, which come out in some realm between color and b&w, not to mention the lighting, is completely extraordinary for a drama of this magnitude).
And, once again, Eastwood shows his master's chops as an actor's director. Jolie, who is probably more well-renown as a star than as an actress at this point in her career, reminds the audience what she's got going for her, and in fact almost appears to underrated in any estimation (Oscar win notwithstanding). She's devastating at all the right moments, but tender and vulnerable and subtle without overdoing it, and at the same time conveying the star power that the role does need. It's a near triumph, and in a sense she does better on the Oscar-bait chart than her director might this time. Also noteworthy are Malkovich as the pastor (one of the few good-guys of the tale), and especially Jason Butler Harner in the crucial, role of Gordon Northcott who skims that line just slightly of hamming it up and turns in one of the creepiest killers in recent memory.
It may be easy to label a Clint Eastwood picture, at least as of late, is a buzz word of masterpiece or great or classic or whatever. But with Changeling, he's made what is at once a crowd-pleasing tear-jerker and one of those stories of mothers and children and women and dirty cops that stick excellently both ways, and possibly earns rightfully a status like masterpiece because he doesn't ever go soft on the subject, never turning an eye to what lies behind certain conventions or pit-falls in a script of this sort, and will only allow the smallest, most ambiguous note of hope at the end. It's intelligent, brave work.