Society Tries to Impose Happy Ending on Tragedy But Mom Turns Down Role.

Rating: 6/10 (9 July 2009)

One of Clint's more challenging films. Angelina Jolie's young son disappears and the corrupt LAPD, prodded into a search, try to foist off a different kid on her. She denies it is her son. The police want the case wrapped up and Jolie's public complaints are becoming a nuisance so they have her committed to a psychiatric hospital where she undergoes various horrifying experiences.
Then a boy shows up in police custody, an illegal Canadian immigrant, who begins to tell a blood-curdling tale of being held with other boys on a ranch near Riverside. The rancher, a fruitcake named Northcott, was in the habit of kidnapping young boys wholesale and slaughtering them at his pleasure with an ax. The ex-Canadian identifies Jolie's son as one of the twenty or so victims. Northcott is captured in Vancouver, convicted in Los Angeles, and hanged in San Quentin.
Years later, still another kid shows up and reveals that, in fact, he and Jolie's son managed a joint escape. The other boy may still be out there somewhere, alive, afraid to return home. The last shot is of Jolie walking with a smile down the street. "It's given me something I didn't have before." A detective who has backed her in the case says, "Huh? What's that?" "Hope," says Jolie sweetly.
That final exchange gave me a shudder because just for a moment a flashbulb exploded in my admittedly unusual brain and I was suddenly watching an old episode of "Dragnet." In fact, the first half hour or more focuses on Angelina Jolie, earth mother. If the end sounded like "Dragnet," the whole beginning of the story looked and sounded like a movie on LMN, the kind with titles like "Please Don't Take My Baby!" and "Why Are You Doing This To Me?" Jolie handles the role of the despairing but ever hopeful mother with seasoned skill but it's a stereotype nevertheless. She's loving, plucky, and defiant in the face of patronizing cops or brutal hospital staff. She gets to weep a lot. My heart was sinking along with hers, as I was pinning down the difference between Eastwood's ambitious story and a typical LMN offering -- higher production values and more expensive actors in the former.
Happily the narrative takes a turn for the better when it shifts from Jolie's clichÃ©d tribulations to the new investigation by the police, led sub rosa by a sympathetic but thoroughly UN-stereotyped tough cop, played by Michael Kelly. His is one of three outstanding performances in the film, the others' being that of the mass murderer Northcott, played by Jason Butler Harner, and the final escaped child to turn up in custody and tell the tale, Asher Axe. Harner's role is a difficult one. He must shift his demeanor, his motives, his whole persona, in different directions at different time, a Proteus of a character. The part isn't that well written and it takes skill to pull it off.
In fact, the movie itself doesn't follow the usual narrative template. That's not bad in itself. If the story is based on real events, it can only be twisted so far. But this plot is wrought by the writer, J. Michael Straczynski, in a way that seems to me to hold the audience in something like contempt. Anti-climax follows anti-climax with the strictness of a religious ritual. And we don't really get a single solid scene with Northcott the monster until his execution when, yet again, we get to go through the process -- the shivering convict, the solemn reverend, the thirteen steps, the grim witnesses, the black hood, the adjusting of the hairy noose, the checking of the watch to make sure there are no last-minute reprieves, the nod of the warden to the executioner, the flapping of the trap door, the plunging of the shackled body, and this time Clint lingers on the victim's final spasms a long time -- too long. I'm frankly getting tired of these execution scenes. We've seen dozens of them lately. They're getting more and more explicit. Is there some hidden appeal in a realistic scene of a man being deliberately murdered? If so, it's under my head. They're starting to look like slasher movies for adults.
It's one of Clint's more arty movies but not, in my opinion, one of his best. The period detail is exquisite. Love those antique cars! But the photography is darker than it needs to be. Even the scene in the desert, with dead bodies being unearthed, is shot late in the afternoon so that the sun is low, the shadows long, and the atmosphere mephitic. There are a few other jarring instants. Jolie would have referred to an "ice box" rather than a "fridge" in 1928. And she would not have said, "F--- you, and the horse you rode in on." These are lapses in judgment not so much because they're anachronistic but because Clint, as the director, either didn't realize that they were, or, worse, didn't think anyone would notice them. There are other scenes that are eminently predictable -- the hellish psychopathic ward, the pinched-face nurses fire hosing the patient, the screaming fruitcake in the next bunk.
With its several flaws, though, the movie is still worth watching. I'd never heard of the case before yet, according to what we see on the screen, it had a great deal of impact on California law.