I hesitated quite a bit before deciding to dedicate 2 hours and 20 minutes of my time to watching Clint Eastwood‘s 2008 movie ‘Changeling‘. One of the reasons is Clint himself, I’m not one of his enthusiastic fans, and every time I face a film of his, the result is that I appreciate the film, including his talent and professionalism as a director, but I can’t say I like it. There is something in his subjects and in the rigidity of his approach that keeps me at a distance. In addition, this film strongly desires to warn the audiences starting from the poster and from the introducing titles that it is based upon a ‘true story’. Paradoxically, this kind of aggressive marketing makes me pay close attention to the artistic authenticity of the film, which depends on many other factors that have nothing to do with the anecdotal detail that what we see on screen is faithful or very faithful to events that happened in reality. Some of my fears were confirmed by watching ‘Changeling‘, but fortunately there are many other reasons why at the end of watching the viewers have a chance to be satisfied even if they are not among Clint‘s fans.
Most of the story takes place in Los Angeles in 1928, with an ending that lasts until 1935. That was the year before the Great Depression and the end of a period of expansion in California. Angelina Jolie (Angelina Jolie) is what today we call a ‘single mother’. Her husband left her on the birthday of their son, Walter, and she works hard at the telephone company to ensure a decent living. One day, on a Saturday when she was called to work, 9-year-old Walter disappears. Kidnapped? Murdered? Strange events took place in California at that time, including the disappearance of children. After a few months, the police announce that Walter has been found on the other side of America, but when he appears, Christine is convinced that the boy police brought to her is not her son. From here the action branches into two parallel threads. One is a social drama about the single woman facing a corrupt system that refuses to admit mistakes and goes so far as to lock her up in a psychiatric institution to make her accept the official version. The other is a police investigation into the abduction of children, possibly related to the boy’s disappearance. Spectators will judge the extent to which the two threads of the story merge and clarify each other.
Clint Eastwood seems to love so much the cinema of the 60s and 70s, the timewhen he was at the peak of his acting career, that even now, when he is a well-known director, some the films he directs have a flavour that belongs to that era. The 2008 ‘Changeling‘ is a film about the late ’20s that seems to have been made in the’ 70s. The screenplay written by J. Michael Straczynski has an interesting idea, switching over two cinematic stereotypes. Unlike a few other Hollywood movies that retrospectively forgive the LAPD and its officers of any guilt in connection with the violent methods used to fight organised crime, in ‘Changeling‘ the police plays the role of the ‘bad guys’, while to the help of the single woman fighting the system comes as the ‘good guy’ a preacher with a radio audience, the kind of those who would gain a much worse reputation, at least in movies. John Malkovich seems a bit over-cast in the role of Pastor Gustav Briegleb. I greatly appreciated the acting performance of an actor I didn’t know, Jason Butler Harner in the role of a criminal the kind that Peter Lorre was undertaking in the 1930s in the films of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. Angelina Jolie didn’t convince me here either that she deserves her acting fame. Tom Stern‘s cinematography, on the other hand, is remarkable, with scenes filmed on location appropriately enhanced by computers to reconstruct the topography of the period, plus an impressive parade of cars of the time. I also liked the music, chosen and composed by Eastwood himself – discreet enough not to bother and expressive enough to emphasize the mood, with a main theme that deserves to be added to the playlist of famous musical themes. For me, ‘Changeling‘ – like other Eastwood-directed films – failed to engage me emotionally, but many of its artistic qualities are to be appreciated and make the film worth watching.