Changeling

About the time all of the characters are making plans to follow the Academy Awards presentation, I started to think, “you shouldn’t be so cute about the Oscars if you have no chance of getting one for this movie.” It’s a karmic thing.

Set in 1928 and based on a true story, Angelina Jolie stars as Christina – a single mother raising her young son in the Lincoln Heights section of Los Angeles. One day, she is required to go to work and leave her young son, Walter (Gattlin Griffith), at home, but, when she returns, the boy is missing. Months later, when all hope seems gone, The LAPD miraculously find Walter, but Christina is convinced this is not her child, and will face great obstacles to finding the truth.

Is this her child?

Where is Walter?

Why are the police so convinced?

Changeling is a missed opportunity with amazing moments stuck next to failed ones. Writer J. Michael Straczynski dedicated a great deal of effort to masterfully stick very closely to the true story, with a few exceptions, but needed director Clint Eastwood or one of the producers to step in and focus the story on the Walter Collins mystery and less on Christine Collins’s crusade.

Some people might be happy with this direction, but I think Changeling becomes too much about Collins’s emotions. For me, the most interesting part of the movie is the mystery about where the child has gone and why the cops are so adamant that they have found Walter in the face of such damning evidence to the contrary. Yet, Eastwood and Straczynski take us far beyond the point where we find out about the kid, and never really give us a good explanation about why the cops are so invested in discrediting Christina.

Worse yet, Eastwood allows some of the villains to become silly caricatures, and this is because Straczynski provides horribly written dialogue for these characters. Officer J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) might as well be twisting a handlebar mustache as his obsession with closing the case and discrediting Collins borders on insanity and becomes laughable (I don’t think dramas that unintentionally cause the audience to laugh win Oscars, how much did you laugh at Titanic?). The bad guys are forced to say such stupid lines it’s hard to believe no one on the set asked for a re-write. Jones and his crew become exaggerated, phony parodies.

Sadly, Eastwood also marvelously delivers some of the best drama of the year as we get the big revelation in a scene that has every member of the audience on their seats and shocked at the BIG twist. He’s one of the great directors of all time, and proves it in moments like this, but it makes you wonder why the other scenes are so bad.

Changeling is too long. We’re done an hour before the movie is and wonder why the rest matters. We can appreciate Christina’s crusade, but do we need a plot about cleaning up LAPD corruption 80 years later? Then, Eastwood has the movie sometimes bordering on being a bad B-movie horror flick (you already know Christine gets tossed into an insane asylum, and these scenes are like some sort of Frankenstein flick) and other times Changeling borders on being a late night copper movie from the 30’s.

Changeling could have been the movie of the year, instead it will fade away as the Oscar race heats up, and my new prediction comes true. The Dark Knight will get the Best Picture nomination Changeling could have earned.

Changeling is Rated R for some violent and disturbing content, and language.