There may be no more solid director in Hollywood than Clint Eastwood. However, such praise is double-edged. While it means that Eastwood knows how to choose his projects with meticulous care and craft films that rarely err on the side of triviality, it also means that they only occasionally reach for and even rarer still, achieve true greatness. Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby are superb recent examples of Eastwood’s sentiments commingling with superior material that, in some instances, works even better in his skilled hands because it reflects back on the director’s own career, a sort of cinematic op-ed. Eastwood’s latest film, Changeling, is certainly a solid film by anyone’s definition. But it is not a great film. It is unfortunate that something this exceptionally manicured could also be this listless and dull.
Changeling is based on a lurid true story that vibrates with tabloid sensibilities. The film opens in 1928 Los Angeles, a few years before Jakes Gittes swaggered through the embryonic city in Chinatown and decades before James Ellroy populated his pulp noirs like L.A. Confidential with platinum blondes and steel-jawed heavies. Still, the film aims to capture a mythical, primordial city, firmly established yet still poised on the edge of a 20th-century Wild West frontier. Late one Saturday afternoon, modern woman and single mother Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) returns home from work to discover her 9-year-old son, Walter, has vanished without a trace. Following months of a halfhearted and apathetic investigation, the Los Angeles Police Department claims to have found her son. There’s just one problem. The boy they produce, to wild jubilation and media hoopla, is not Walter.
When Christine protests, the captain in charge of the case, J. J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), deems her mentally unstable and locks her away in a sanitarium, the latest in a long line of women the police have silenced by “losing” them in the cuckoo’s nest. The scandal-prone LAPD want nothing to soil their recent public relations coupe — particularly the truth. Infested with corruption, the crooked police force is the favorite target of a local minister, Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), who uses his church pulpit as a bully pulpit to assail the sins of police corruption. Taking up Christine’s cause, Briegleb, more fire-breathing Old Testament prophet than meek religious shepherd, leads a city-wide crusade to liberate Christine and get to the truth of Walter’s disappearance.
Changeling would be a compelling feminist protest drama were its lead something more than a one-dimensional cardboard cutout. It’s not that Jolie does a bad job — far from it — but she is given little else to do than weep and occasionally fly into a rage. Her job is simply to suffer. Jolie’s Christine is not the only one similarly disabled. Her guardian angel, Briegleb, is equally one-dimensional and uncomplicated with flesh and blood details. The only thing that Donovan’s Jones is missing is a mustache to twirl.
Unfortunately, just as it failed as a feminist drama, Changeling also fails as a thriller, which is what a large portion of the film strives to be. Eastwood shoots, what is, in essence, a horror film (with the appropriate deep shadows and leering, grotesque faces). However, he is (mercifully) unwilling to wholly commit to a story that involves the gruesome butchery of children and thus robs himself of yet another layer of emotional impact. Instead of richly drawn characters or gripping suspense, Eastwood settles on a police and judicial procedural that goes on for far too long and saunters through numerous endings.
Clint Eastwood is an old fashioned director. He is not interested in flashy camerawork. He believes deeply that the fourth wall separating the audience from the action should be as invisible as possible. However, as perfectly rendered as it is, Eastwood’s L.A. never feels lived in. His is a counterfeit aesthetic. The backlot on which many of the outdoor scenes are filmed is overly pristine. We can imagine the two-by-fours and braces supporting the all-too-obvious facades. There is no doubting the director’s attention to detail, but everything is so fashion-glossy lit and perfectly presented as to actually call attention to its reproductive quality rather than reflect the reality of the time.
Changeling muses over some of the same somber, funereal, nightmarish themes that have haunted Eastwood’s work of late. The 78-year-old has been examining the dark underbelly of society with noticeably black results. He succeeds at conjuring soot so well that when he injects a starburst of hope, no matter how small, it feels forced and jarringly out of place. In Changeling, Eastwood has not earned the hope he requires, making it ring all the more hollow when he forces it down our throats at the very last second.
Changeling is both impressive and tedious, a beautiful, impeccably crafted movie that regrettably finds itself adrift in its manipulative final moments. Because there is so little mystery, there is next to nothing to hold our interest. It’s not that the story isn’t worthy. But Eastwood’s no nonsense, American classicism and staid formality actually backfires this time. Instead of going deeper than a cursory, surface reading of the plot, Eastwood neglects the rich pool of social critique and metaphor that’s his for the asking, and keeps our emotions at arm’s length as a result.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
