Ambitious single mom neglects child and pays for it

Rating: 4/10 (4 July 2009)

Looking past the lush setting of 1928 Los Angeles, which involves various startling trompe l'oeuil effects that must be state-of-the-art but don't help a weak plot, what is Changeling about? It frankly admits that the heroine, Christine Collins, an ambitious single mother played by screen goddess Angelina Jolie, left her nine-year-old child at home all day while she served an extra shift at the telephone company in the hope of a promotion.
On this day, she failed to put her son before her work, although she had promised to take him to the movies. Furthermore, there was nobody else to step forward and take her place while she went to the office, because evidently our heroine 1.) did not have any friends 2.) did not have any relatives 3.) did not have any neighbours who could have taken care of the unfortunate boy and thereby prevented him being abducted and killed, and nor did her son have any friends whose parents might have stood in for a few hours and spared him a terrifying day abandoned in his home. So, is Changeling about a lonely, socially incompetent and neglectful mother who indirectly caused her son to be murdered by abandoning him in an empty house? No, obtusely the film is about the persecution of Mrs Collins, who complains when the LAPD fobs her off with a substitute son instead of arresting her for child abuse.
Of course, the film takes pains to establish Mrs Collins as a devoted and deeply caring mother who every day accompanies her boy to a massive, impersonal educational institution by public transport, and who cuddles him lots and gives him a proper breakfast and not a packet of junk-food slung after him on the way out the door. Although she apparently has no friends, neighbours or relatives, she is one of the tiny minority who had a telephone at home in 1928, but somehow she fails to use it to check on her beloved son while she is away from him, even though she is a communications professional. Nor has she taught her son to use the instrument from which she makes her living to call her at work and enjoy a few words of reassurance during her eight-hour absence. So it's a bewildering shock to her when she waltzes home after a long day at the office and finds her totally isolated and ignored child missing. Director Clint Eastwood apparently found none of this basic premise for his movie at all ambiguous. For him, Mrs Collins was a model mother and an icon of virtue in a sea of corrupt manhood.
If such directorial perversity is not enough to put you off watching this picture, then be warned about the leading lady, Ms. Jolie, whose acting abilities, already limited, are paralysed by the impossible task of portraying a villain as a heroine, and a strong-willed woman as a hapless victim. The result, inevitably, is horribly unconvincing.