Imagine this wildy ridiculous plot line for a film: a single mother's nine-year-old son mysteriously disappears when she has to leave him home alone for a day. Her life goes on pause for two weeks while she deals with the search, and then with the sad realization that the police can't find him. While continuing at her job, she never stops searching for her son...until she receives word from the police — five months after his disappearance — that they've found him!
She rushes to greet him, but when the police present the boy to her, she is stunned to discover that the boy is not her son. Despite her insistence that the boy is not hers, the police captain in charge of the case insists the boy is hers, suggests that he has changed so much in the time he was missing that she just doesn't recognize him, and intimidates her into taking the boy.
She continues to insist that the boy isn't hers, and the police captain, fed up with her tenacity and fearful of the negative publicity she could bring down on the police department, has her apprehended and committed to an insane asylum.
In Changeling (2008), directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie, that is exactly the far-fetched and unbelievable plot.
In a minor departure from the usual Eastwood auto-fellatio, the director seems to have managed to resist the urge to also star in this film. However, the musical score in this Depression-era period piece, a woefully ill-fitting smooth-jazz theme (music by Clint Eastwood), occasionally displaces the film from its era. The rest of it, however, appears properly in place. Set in Los Angeles, there are still locations in the City of Angels left over from the late 1920s and early '30s that, with a little adjustment, could be rendered believably back into the period. The costumes were superb; the hairstyles never jarred me back into the 21st century.
Angelina Jolie plays Christine Collins, the mother of Walter Collins, the boy abducted while Christine is away. Admittedly, I am not an Angelina Jolie fan. Before viewing Changeling, I can't recall ever seeing a Jolie film which has required her to act, but I must say I was pleasantly surprised with her turn here. Aside from a few clearly admiring close-ups of Jolie's face, the film does a good job reminding itself that it isn't about her bombshell beauty, but about a regular, work-a-day woman and the search for her boy.
Also well executed is the feeling of horrific absurdity at the police department's refusal to listen to Christine Collins as she insists they've brought her the wrong boy, as well as the uncertainty the film plants in the viewer's mind over whether this boy is or is not Walter. After he goes missing, we never see Walter's face again to compare with the boy that is presented to Collins, so we are left with the decision either to side with Collins — who has on her side only a mother's intuition — or to doubt her.
In what seems a nod to a cliché of the more recent turn of the century, the film paints a dark picture of the Los Angeles Police Department as a deeply corrupt organization that operates more for its own benefit than that of the public, outfitting as many thugs in its uniform as there are out running the streets, and terrorizing as many citizens as criminals. When Christine Collins's story reaches the ears and the radio airwaves of anti-LAPD corruption crusader Rev. Gustav Briegleb, portrayed by John Malkovich, she finally has an ally who brings her an army of supporters and additional heat on the LAPD.
The LAPD's response — individually by Captain J. J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) — rather than reexamine their procedures in finding this boy, is to apprehend Christine and commit her to an insane asylum under a "code 12," a blanket tactic for getting rid of problem cases without arrest or trial. On the outside, an LAPD detective working on an otherwise unrelated immigration case stumbles upon some evidence that, along with Rev. Briegleb's army, throws the whole case out into the light of day.
The film works its way to its end with several climaxes, some satisfying and others not so.
Ultimately this far-fetched film is just sad. With its unbelievable plot and its impossibly arrogant police department executives refusing to listen to a woman desperate to find her son, the film is so terribly sad because all of it is true. It really happened.
The story of Christine Collins and her missing son, Walter, was a big story in Los Angeles when the boy went missing in 1928. The police department, suffering a public relations nightmare for its corrupt activities, seized on an opportunity for positive press when they found a homeless boy matching the description of Walter in DeKalb, Illinois. They sincerely believed he was Walter, as the boy they found somehow knew of the story of Walter Collins, and claimed to be him. When Christine Collins told the police that the boy was not her son, rather than admit their mistake, the police intimidated Collins and tried to shame her into admitting the boy was her son, and eventually committed her to an asylum because of her refusal.
Despite the case working itself out in the newspapers and city council hearings, it likely fell into obscurity with the fall of the stock markets in 1929. Changeling's screen writer, J. Michael Straczynski, was made aware of the case by a Los Angeles city worker tasked with examining ancient city files slated for destruction. It becomes apparent that the corruption apparently rampant in today's Los Angeles Police Department is part of a long, shameful legacy reaching further back than anyone realized.
The lengths some people will go — at the expense of the innocent and of those truly in need — to preserve their fragile egos or positions of title... it boggles the mind.
Changeling (2008) A Numb Butt Cheeks® rating of 7.5* At Clint Eastwood's helm the film has an almost lackadaisical pace, more of what I would expect of a Depression-era film set in New Orleans...or perhaps that is the influence of the Eastwood-penned smooth-jazz soundtrack. Over all, it's a very moving film, with a solid performance by star Angelina Jolie, and the realization that, not only could this happen in the United States, it did happen.
*The Numb Butt-Cheeks® scale of zero to ten: a Numb Butt-Cheeks rating of zero indicates such a disregard for the film that one could get up to go to the bathroom at any point without worry of missing anything exciting or important; a Numb Butt-Cheeks rating of ten indicates there is no way one would get up and leave, save for a distinct tearing of bladder tissue.
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