Clint Eastwood's Passion Play

Rating: 5/10 (15 November 2008)

In the old days, Clint Eastwood was Dirty Harry, the vigilante maverick pitted against a world of bleeding heart liberals. Now times have changed and he's drifted more toward the left. In Million Dollar Baby, spokespersons for the Roman Catholic Church are the bad guys because they're against assisted suicide. In Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood attempts to soft pedal Japanese fanaticism by offering up the quid pro quo of a 'good' Japanese soldier to balance out a 'bad' one. And here in 'Changeling', it's the corrupt LAPD from the late 1920s which is the subject of another one of Eastwood's morality plays.
In Eastwood's world view, it's simply a question of good vs. evil. That's why he's always drawn to melodrama which is the perfect type of drama for reminding us that he's always on the 'right' (and winning) side! Changeling's screenwriter, Michael Straczynski, researched this true crime story for a year and then changed the facts not only to improve the narrative but to also manipulate our emotions. Part of his quandary was that he needed to integrate two tangentially related aspects of the story, the kidnapping of the 10 year old boy, Walter Collins, and the mass murders of children on the Northcott Farm (Straczynski decided not to put the killer's mother into the script even though she actually confessed to the murder of the Collins boy and was sentenced to prison).
Stracyznski is much more successful simply relating the details of the investigation into the child killings. Tension builds as one of the detectives uncovers the horror quite by chance after having to track down a juvenile runaway who needs to be deported to his native Canada. Before he's shipped back home, the juvenile reveals the sickening details of what happened and this in turn leads to a series of grim scenes including the digging up of evidence, the flight and apprehension of the accused in Vancouver, flashbacks of the actual crimes and the eventual trial and execution of the murderer.
James Harner as Gordon Northcott, looks a lot like the actual killer (check the old photos!) and ably conveys his creepy manic and manipulative demeanor. When dealing with the historical facts of the crime itself, Eastwood is on solid ground. He falters however when he dwells too long on the sickening circumstances of the killer's execution. What exactly is the point in drawing out this scene? Again it's part and parcel of Eastwood's strategy to champion himself as the guardian of morality. The bad guys always must get their comeuppance whether it's pointing a gun at a miscreant and blurting out "make my day" or having a serial killer twist at the end of the hangman's rope a little longer than the viewer needs to see.
Unfortunately Stracyznski appears to be at a complete loss as to what to do with the film's protagonist, Christine Collins. In real life, Collin's husband was locked up in San Quentin. Could it be that Collins wasn't the saint that Stracyznski makes her out to be? It certainly would have been more interesting to have Collins depicted as a complicated human being than the melodramatic victim depicted here. Collin's victimhood reaches its apotheosis when the police lock her up without a warrant at the Psychopathic Hospital. In a derivative scene right out of 'One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest', Collins is subjected to various degradations including a strip search, imprisonment on the mental ward, a coercive interview by the institution's vile psychiatrist and shock treatment given to a prostitute who comes to her aid (Stracyznski fails to do his research since shock treatment wasn't used in mental institutions until 1937!).
Angelina Jolie is not an actor of great range to begin with but here she's saddled with a script that tells us virtually nothing about its main character. Jolie is good at histrionic expression but after awhile there are a few too many scenes where she pleads, "I want my child back". The film's ending loses dramatic tension since the protagonist becomes a passive participant. Collins not only sits through Northcottt's trial but she also is a spectator at the City inquiry into police misconduct in her case. In addition to Christine, the good Reverand Briegleb, played by John Malkovich, is another overly self-righteous character who remains underdeveloped (I also wondered if the police were so corrupt, why didn't they at least harass the Reverand at any point?) James Donovan's J.J. Jones was much more on the mark as Christine's tormentor (although the Irish accent probably would have been more applicable to New York than Los Angeles).
Despite his liberal leanings these days, Clint Eastwood will never give up his original moniker as 'Dirty Harry'. He'll always be the man to protect us from the criminal element whether they be ordinary street thugs, corrupt police and government officials, serial killers or (as in his new film, Gran Torino) Asian street gangs! As long as Eastwood continues to see himself as an arbiter of morality, we will continue to endure more melodramatic tales of stereotyped self-righteous victims triumphing over cold-hearted villains.