changeling

Clint Eastwood is old. He is so old that he remembers exactly what Los Angeles looked like during the 1920s. Unfortunately, he is also so old that he has begun to forget how to direct a powerful movie.

In Changeling, Angelina Jolie stars as Christine Collins, a single mother living with her son Walter in L.A. circa 1928. One Saturday, she leaves for work. When she comes home, she discovers that her son has vanished. After months of fruitless hunting, the police find a boy claiming to be Walter. Christine insists that this child is not her son. But as she points this out, she is treated first as a hysterical traumatized woman and then as a lunatic and threat to public order. She is ignored, smeared in the papers and then locked away in a mental hospital.

Jolie's character never stops fighting, but the film's weaknesses are apparent as Jolie never stops overacting. Her two-dimensional portrayal makes every scene feel overwrought with distress and overwhelmed by a narrow range of emotions. There are a limited number of ways to respond to sneering male condescension, and she exhausts them fairly quickly. The film, on the other hand, seems to never exhaust itself and stretches well past the two-hour mark, creating boredom where a dark investigation of multiple forms of evil was possible.

Michael Straczynski's script, although based on an entirely true story, comes off as wholly unfathomable. Eastwood establishes a near perfect period piece, but forgets to add in any soul. There are glimmers of potential and even long sequences where the film is an engaging tale of wronged innocence in the hands of unaccountable power. The complicated, incredible story, however, is its own undoing as tension dissipates and is soon replaced by a desire for the meandering, unfocused effort to draw to a conclusion.