Just because a film makes you cry doesn’t mean it’s any good...
In this Prohibition Era, David and Goliath tale, Angelina Jolie plays passionate and devoted single mother Christine Collins, whose mission to find her snatched son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) ends up toppling a corrupt police department in 1920s Los Angeles. Historic accuracy loses out in this ‘tidied up’ version of a true story, but director Clint Eastwood succeeds in narrowing the 80 year gap since the events by making their retelling at once shocking, thought-provoking, and familiar for a 21st Century audience. The result is a chilling tale of the worst that can happen when an individual makes a stand against an enormously powerful and corrupt authority.
This is not a film where the audience sits silently shouting obvious solutions that the characters conveniently miss because in the olden days people were stupid and anyway the plot needs to be spun out for another two hours. Collins’ horrific treatment by the LAPD for refusing to accept their official line on her “son’s” re-appearance is difficult to watch, partly because Jolie makes you feel Collins’s frustration and total confusion.
But it is also difficult to believe this ordinary person could beat an army of corrupt doctors and police – as well as a lying little boy, desperate to see his favourite cowboy actor. Luckily for Collins, the crafty Pastor Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich, with wig) is on hand to help with influential friends of his own. The Changeling sounds like the title of a Stephen King novel and the film does include the best aspects of both a horror and a thriller. The film’s weakness, however, is that it fails to depict Collins as anything other than an emotional mother (all be it one who is ahead of her time when it comes to knowledge of identification by dental records). When her son is taken Collins is at work, yet there is no description in a film set in 1928 of the kind of self-reproach or guilt that runs through modern working mothers’ minds even when they get home and their kids are still safely glued to the computer. By attempting to make Collins stand out in stark contrast to the dark forces around her Eastwood has fallen into the trap of making her a cardboard cut out ‘angel of the house’. The woman is given no internal monologue, no voice behind her motherhood, and appears just the latest in a never-ending stream of magical movie mothers. She starts sugary and dissolves into the surreal, diluting an extraordinary story on the way. Check out the times for this film and other releases at the Kingston Odeon
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