Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/5/08
Life,
as I'm sure we're all aware, is not a movie. Tidy beginnings, middles
and ends are hard to come by, and so it's the great challenge facing filmmakers
trying to tell a historical story to find those perfect endpoints with
which to frame compelling true life events. Most true stories end
with some kind of crawl telling us what happened in the years to follow,
and you may sometimes find yourself saying “Man, I wish they'd shown that
part.” Offering the counterpoint to that thought is Clint Eastwood's
Changeling,
which tells a fascinating story of kidnapping, murder, corruption and mistaken
identity that rocked Los Angeles in the late 20's. Alas, it can't
stop telling it, and goes on and on, hitting virtually every single incident
that happened to any of the participants in the years following the story.
A good 50 minutes longer than it needs to be (and all of it on the back
end), Changeling wore down most of my goodwill toward its' whip-sharp
performances and Eastwood's gift for little moments of horror. There's
a good movie here, but unfortunately, it's followed by a bad one.
March,
1928: phone switchboard supervisor Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie)
is called in to work on a Saturday, leaving her young son Walter (Gattlin
Griffith) home alone. When she returns, the house is empty and there's
no sign of him anywhere. The police refuse to help until 24 hours
have elapsed: kids, she's told, always find their way home sooner
or later. But he doesn't, and soon the troubled LAPD is on the case,
led by the slick J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan). Months later, he announces
that the search is over and presents Christine with “Walter” (Devon Conti).
Except, of course, that it's not Walter: the boy only barely matches
the description of the real deal. But the police insist it's him
and line up experts spinning absurd stories about stress compressing spines
and the like while Christine grows more and more enraged at the child who
insists he's hers even as no one close to the family buys it. It's
not their word that matters, of course: led by Chief James E. Davis
(Colm Feore), the force will not accept any suggestion that they brought
her anything but the right kid. When she enlists the help of crusading
minister Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich) and goes public with her evidence,
Jones orders her institutionalized. There, she's tormented by hostile
staff and a sinister doctor (Denis O'Hare) who demands that she sign a
paper disavowing her real son and excusing the force of all blame for putting
her there. She won't do it, but another inmate (Amy Ryan) explains
the score: the institution is filled with “Code 12”s, women locked
away because they challenged the absolute authority of the police, and
there are only two choices: play ball or be drugged and shocked into
a vegetable. Can Christine hold out long enough for us to figure
out why the movie keeps cutting to Detective Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly)
and his investigation of a seemingly minor immigration violation?
Of
course, those familiar with the real-life case know very well where that
thread will lead, and those revelations coupled with Christine's stand
against the horrors of the asylum provide Changeling with a potent
climax which, alas, arrives with 50 minutes of running time left to go.
Other than soft-peddling the shocking details (although what we see is
still plenty shocking) of what would be dubbed the Wineville Chicken Coop
Murders, writer J. Michael Straczynski (debuting on the big screen after
decades in TV and comic books) includes virtually every documented fact
about Collins, her son, and serial killer Gordon Stewart Northcott (Jason
Butler Harner). In many ways, the narrative arc reminds me of that
of Straczynski's claim to fame, his 5-season TV Sci-Fi epic Babylon
5. At its' best, B5 was riveting, but the ongoing arc
climaxed in the middle of the 4th season only to continue droning on with
hours upon hours of denouement. It's not that some of the material
in the last hour isn't interesting, it's that I'm not sure it's interesting
enough that seeing it enacted improves on the experience of reading that
it happened in an end credits crawl. However much the movie wants
us to believe otherwise, nothing in these scenes in any way alters how
Christine Collins' story ended. And when the movie finally does choose
to stop, it offers us a crawl that essentially says that similar scenes
continued to play out for the rest of the participants' lives.
Before
it loses its' way, Changeling has most of the merits one associates
with Eastwood's work, chief among them amazing performances. Jolie
is a pretty modern woman by any measure, but she does a sensational job
of adopting the quiet and calm one associates with the people of the era
while at the same time nailing every opportunity to show us that Christine
is a living, breathing woman who enjoys being a mother and has an opinion
on which movie should win Best Picture at the Oscars. She's challenged
by horrors she couldn't have imagined as the movie opens, from sharing
a house with an impostor who insists he's her child to having to choose
between throwing her life away by signing that paper and receiving electroshock
therapy. Jolie nails both the helpless horror (the scene where she
first meets her Doctor and keeps saying all the wrong things in the name
of seeming sane is brilliant) and the strength that got her through it.
Donovan's got one of those great acting tics, a 100-watt smile that's almost
shockingly insincere. On TV's Burn Notice, he skillfully uses
it in a variety of ways, my favorite being to throw up a wall of false
happiness to hide his inner turmoil. Here, as the insidiously corrupt
Capt. Jones, it's the perfect “Friendly Neighborhood Policeman” mask we
all know is a lie. He turns wonderfully on a dime from flattering
Christine to modest threats and then to full-bore malice and intimidation.
Feore is a master movie heel who oozes corruption as the Chief without
even breaking a sweat, and O'Hare is so odious as the shrink that I wanted
to pound on him. Griffith does a great job of making us love the
real Walter in his few scenes while Conti is equally good at making us
hate the fake one. Ryan's special skill for seeming like a real woman
from the wrong side of the tracks serves her well as a prostitute who's
inconvenienced the cops just enough to buy a ticket to the asylum. Harner
is perfectly disturbing and unhinged as the serial killer. Malkovich
shows his soft side admirably, although as a guy with a funny last name,
I can tell you he's not at all convincing at introducing himself as “Gustav
Briegleb”.
I've
often thought Eastwood would shine as the director of a full-on horror
movie, because his best work tends to showcase an atmosphere of creeping
dread and he's always been good at nailing scary scenes. Changeling
is FILLED with scary moments, and he alternates quiet and noise very skillfully.
There's an execution during the lengthy third act that's as utterly chilling
as any I've ever seen in a movie. But he must share in some of the
blame as well: once the focus of the story shifts from the present
to the past, he allows a lack of urgency to overtake the proceedings, and
the crisp sense of danger that permeated the first 90 minutes only makes
the final 50 seem all the flabbier by comparison. His crew skillfully
recreates the late 20's, and I never once doubted the time period.
I wish
I had liked Changeling better, because it has much to recommend,
and will play better on TV when a person can drop in and out at their leisure.
I'm still surprised to have checked out the true story online and found
that the script sticks so close to the facts, because some of those facts
seem like pure sensationalist fiction. But ultimately, this is a
movie to be studied for the lessons it teaches us about narrative momentum
and the importance of framing a historical incident correctly. Most
every crime leads to a trial, most every scandal leads to public hearings,
most every death sentence leads to an execution, and most every unanswered
question resonates through the decades to come. That doesn't mean
we need to see it. |
