Changeling

It is the after effect from a hand grenade to be more precise because Clint Eastwood’s latest is an important, emotionally engaging and well crafted piece of work and Oscar is its target.

It certainly ticks all the boxes that Oscars aim for but Eastwood has made a film of such admirable ambition it’s hard not to be stirred by it. In fact it won’t come in to your mind as you watch it, it’s irrelevant anyway because Oscar or no Oscar it’s a great film from arguably America’s greatest living director.

The plot centres on Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) and her harrowing experience. Christine is a hard working single mother living in late 20’s Los Angeles. She returns from work one evening to find that her son, Walter, is missing. She frantically searches the house and the streets looking everywhere for him. He’s nowhere to be found. Christine immediately gets the police involved and they manage to locate and bring back Walter to her. However, Christine is convinced it’s not actually her son. Her quest for the truth and her son culminate in an astonishing tale that sees Christine humiliated, persecuted and incarcerated. It may sound rather unbelievable but it is in fact based almost entirely on a true story.

Changeling is truly an emotional experience; Eastwood creates a film of many parts, tackling each strand of the narrative with his usual no-nonsense approach. The film sprawls because of this and no director could have tackled better the unbelievable narrative and make it so important, involving and all too relevant. It is true to say Changeling whilst clearly in contention for Oscars is at times incredibly dark in its subject matter. It’s to Eastwood’s credit that he boldly keeps it in the dark, a hard watch it may be but it’s necessary that such dark subject matter may be mined by an uncompromising vision.

It is Angelina Jolie’s performance that anchors the film: we stick with her character through her struggles and her heartbreaking portrayal of absolute powerlessness in a morally corrupt society. It is so convincingly played its hard not to feel for any parent who has experienced such unbearable agony. The film is best seen through her tiresome eyes: a fascinating and riveting portrayal of women’s struggle against a male dominated oppressive society. Her numerous confrontations with police captain J.J Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) perfectly captured the apparent female fragility and unstableness. When she protests that the child the police returned is not Walter, Captain Jones suggests she’s being hysterical. When she mentions her son Walter was circumcised and the boy they returned is not; people stare in disgust.

Other commendations should go to the production designers and the cinematographer Tom Stern who create a great evocation of late 20’s and early 30’s Los Angeles to such effect that its rapidly accepted into the films’ verisimilitude as the norm, you stop looking for little imperfections because there are none to be found. There are also features reminiscent of fellow Neo Noirs L.A Confidential and more importantly Chinatown; whose representation shows a whole town in corruption. Changeling’s score also shares similar sounds to Chinatown’s sinister undertones that lurk underneath the seemingly perfect ‘City of Angels’.

Eastwood tackles a lot, perhaps too much for some viewers. Besides tackling the challenging task of feminist representations in past society and in film, he also comments on capital punishment, hypocrisy and the justice system. Eastwood does occasionally reject realism for sentimentality but his vision isn’t that compromised; the film’s labyrinth of darkness remains pitch black and the final third of the film is perhaps the most bleak because here lies the film’s greatest merit; it’s challenging of audience perceptions at the most controversial of subjects. Eastwood after leaves you so uncertain as to your stance on these issues it becomes immediately clear he doesn’t want to play it safe and Changeling works best at keeping its audience off balance.

Changeling belongs to Clint Eastwood; he has cemented his place as one of America’s greatest living directors with his own dark, dark take on a noir. Changeling is sometimes melodramatic and contrived in its emotions; the word Oscar may leap to the front of your mind consistently. Its occasional lapses into sentimentality and its thinly drawn characters still don’t detract much from the film’s overall feel: it’s still a difficult watch and remains thought provoking without ever being pretentious; the result is a memorable and important film.

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