A true story....but still hard to swallow

Rating: 6/10 (16 March 2009)

The first thing to mention here about this movie is that it is a true story. If it wasn't - you'd find it very hard to swallow. First things first - the title? Changeling? I must confess I had never heard that word before and did not know what it meant. I looked it up and found this "(in folklore) an ugly, stupid, or strange child left by fairies in place of a pretty, charming child." Good description. A single mother - Jolie - goes to work leaving her 9 year old son at home alone. She returns to an empty house. A few months later the police tell her that they have found her son - but when she sees this "found" boy - it is not her kid. The cops however coerce her to "try out the boy for a few weeks". She does so but Jolie's character maintains her stance and continues to rail against the LAPD protesting that her boy is still out there somewhere.
It is set in the 1920's and 30's America where Jolie has a telephone exchange job and lives quite well in a nice house, nice neighbourhood alone with only her son as company. The sets are great, the attention to detail spot on - nothing to complain about here. The acting too is impressive. Do I like Jolie? Not really....I cannot see what the fuss is about her on the looks front (she doesn't do it for me I'm afraid) and some of her films leave a little to be desired also. But I won't knock her for this performance - she was solid and played her character well - as a decent human being but also a strong representation of a single woman in an age where equality had not yet surfaced. Her whole celebrity persona turns me off her a little (well a lot actually) but I tried to put that to one side when watching this movie and give her a fair shot at impressing me. She did.
They are the good things about the movie....are there any bad things? Of course....Eastwood directed it so there is going to be a couple of glaringly obvious things in there somewhere. The first - and most obvious - comes when Jolie arrives home to find her son gone. Before leaving to do some unscheduled work at the office, Jolie tells her boy that she will be back at 4PM and that a neighbour and her daughter will come over to spend a couple hours with him. But when she gets back home, the kid is gone, and she first looks through the house, then asks some kids on the street if they've seen him, and finally phones the police. They ask her when he disappeared, and she replies "I don't know. It could have been this morning, or only an hour ago". Why did she not get in touch with the woman who was supposed to come over for a couple of hours? Shouldn't that have been the FIRST person she would have contacted? The woman could have given her (and the police) an idea of WHEN the kid disappeared. She should also have contacted the woman to see if maybe he was at her house. Unfortunately, the woman seems to have just been entirely forgotten by the script... This is a glaring and sloppy error in the film's logic. How could they let that slip by? A simple scene showing her talking to this woman would suffice - or a scene to inform the audience that no such woman existed - maybe she just told her boy this story to get him to remain indoors and give him a sense of security. One or the other should have happened - but none did.
Another biggie for me was the motivation behind the "impostor" boy. The reason why a small boy would pretend to be a missing child (to move to LA to meet a Hollywood actor) is preposterous and dealt with so matter-of-factly - it was disgraceful. How he got the idea and who encouraged him are inadequately provided. Also, how a 9 year old kid could fool the entire LAPD, doctors, medical people etc. into being someone he is not - is amazingly portrayed. We get some back story implying the LAPD are a corrupt lot with a platoon of gun-toting death squads killing off any competition on the streets to their ill-gotten schemes. But yet these hardened guys could not break a 9 year old boy into telling the truth? Unbelievable. Not only that but the Juvenile police officer had a PHOTOGRAPH of the missing boy - that clearly does not look REMOTELY like this impostor - but yet they never mentioned that in the story. Further on in the movie - a 15 year kid implicated in the disappearance and murder of the boy recognizes the missing kid from the photo straight off - without hesitation, even though he was in a distressed state. I suppose because this is a true story - a lot of these issues are brushed aside - but for me the film did not try to even explain the basic problems here.
The whole premise of the story hinges on the boy's disappearance and the subsequent "finding" - but both of these events are littered with problems. If your basic core of the movie is in trouble - no amount of good acting, fancy sets etc. around the edges will save it.
This is not a bad film - far from it - but it is not the classic people whittle on about either. For me it was a little slow too and coming in at a bum numbing 140 minutes doesn't help its case one iota. Eastwood is a good lad, a solid lad - but needs to speed things up a little at times - and a lot at other times.
6/10.