The Changeling Review

Bottom-Line: A little plodding at times Changeling is a great film.

Produced and directed by Clint Eastwood Changeling chronicles the true story Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) a single mother whose son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) goes missing one day from their Los Angeles home in 1925.

Christine calls the police and after the mandatory 24-hour waiting period the much maligned Los Angeles Police Department starts looking for her son.  They think they have found him in DeKalb, IL and Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) contacts Christine with the good news.  But when the boy arrives Christine insists that he is not her son...

The plot in Changeling is quite involved, too involved to detail here, sufficed to say, the script is brilliantly done and recounts in some detail the events that transpired between 1925 and 1935.

My Viewpoint

The title, Changeling, and the trailers for the movie carry with them an allusion that this was to be a science fiction film and that the events that unfold, despite the fact that they're all very well recorded, are the stuff of fiction.  As an American raised on a constant diet of patriotism and American infallibility, it is almost impossible to believe that such things could have happened within recent memory, but they did, along with a host of other events that run contrary to the county's much polished image as the bastion of equal justice.  The fact that the events that unfold in Changeling serve to make the narrative all the more compelling story it tells is compelling, augmented by Eastwood's own musical score.  The result is gripping cinema, and certainly serves as one of Eastwood best films to date.

 As the nexus of this tale Angeline Jolie as Christine does an excellent job of relating the kaleidoscope of emotions that must have made up Ms. Collins during this period of her life. Jolie never plays Christine over the top; indeed she imbibes the character with a quiet dignity; she is at times emotional, but never distraught to the point where she loses focus on her son and her determination to have him returned to her.  He was her world and her oft silent tears speak volumes about her private suffering at the hands of the Police Department more concerned about protecting itself than it is the citizens they serve.

We Americans like to think that our justice system is the best in the world. That our rights, enshrined as they are in the under the Bill of Rights, can never be infringed upon, especially by those sworn to uphold the very cloth upon which they are printed.  How wrong we all are!  Indeed as Changeling (2008) proves in startling clarity, our rights are at the mercy of those charged with their protection and they, our rights, can and are violated at will by self-serving individuals with anything but Truth, Justice, and the American Way beating in their breasts. 

A little plodding at times Changeling is a great film.  Despite its length (141 minutes) the effective period design, subdued colors, and the suburb plot driven narrative grabbed my attention (and alright some of my emotion) with a firm grip as the story unfolds from Christine's point of view.  I have little problem recommending Changeling.