A Wonderfully Told Story About A Horrible Mystery

Rating: 9/10 (2 November 2009)

When it's over, "Changeling" is one of those movies that leaves you somewhat emotionally drained. I have a very mixed reaction to Clint Eastwood's work both as an actor and as a director - some I love, some is OK, some I really don't care for. There's no consistency. This film, though, is a definite winner, and he's clearly on a winning streak after his great work with "Gran Torino." Set in 1920's Los Angeles and depicting real events, the movie begins a bit slowly, with a depiction of a series of domestic scenes to establish the relationship between single mother Christine Collins and her only son Walter, but once the element of mystery is introduced, Eastwood very skilfully builds the suspense through a series of mysteries. After leaving Walter alone at home when she's called into work, Christine returns home to an empty house, with no clue about what's happened to Walter. At first, the mystery appears to be simply "what happened to Walter?" But it keeps growing. Months later, the police "reunite" Christine with her son - except she's convinced that it isn't her son. Who is this boy? Then a story about police corruption becomes the focus, leading to the police illegally sending Christine off to a psychiatric hospital because she refuses to accept the boy as her son. Along the way, she connects with what you might call an "avenging angel" - a well-known Presbyterian minister with a popular radio ministry who's taken it as his mission to fight police corruption. Finally, the movie becomes extremely dark and disturbing, as it begins to look at a series of child abductions and murders, of which Walter may or may not be a victim.
In the end, there's no resolution - there can't be, because in truth Walter's remains weren't identified, nor was he ever found. What happened to him remains a mystery to this day. Subsequent to watching this I was involved enough with the story to do some checking on the "Wineville Chicken Coop Murders" as they're known in history. The story is remarkably accurate. There are a few details about Christine's experiences which are altered for dramatic licence I suppose, but nothing really substantive, and some details about the killer Gordon Northcott are left out, but again they weren't important to this particular story, since it was about Christine and Walter and not the killer or the murders per se.
Perhaps strangely for a movie that I considered to be a very good one, I can't say that the performances leaped out at me. They were fine; there was nothing wrong with them. It's just that the story itself was so compelling and so well told that the cast seemed secondary. I was actually surprised to check the cast list later and discover that Christine was played by Angelina Jolie. That's a compliment to Jolie, by the way, because she became so totally Christine that I didn't see her as anyone else. This is truly a movie that deserves to be seen. 9/10