Clint Eastwood's Changeling Remembers Christine Collins in Cannes

For Changeling rings the muckracking bells of the likes of I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, and the devoted-mother high notes of Stella Dallas. Its old-fashionedness, or I should say respect for verities, goes hand-in-hand with a particularly Eastwood-esque directness. The result is not as perfect a film as Eastwood has made, but it's damn strong, both as a story and an exploration of the parent-child bond and a polemic. Because despite the fact that it deals with the corruption and venality of a past era, Changeling is at times a very angry picture; Eastwood's angriest, I think, since Unforgiven.

Changeling is based on the trus story of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a single mom in Los Angeles whose young son is abducted while she's away at work. Five months later, Police Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) stages a press event to celebrate the discovery and return of the boy. Only Collins insists—and the audience knows—that the boy she meets at the train station is not her son. Collins insists on this fact, and for her trouble winds up locked up in the psycho ward of a mental hospital (shades of The Snake Pit, admitedly not a Warner picture, but you can't have everything) that's largely just a disguised repository for any woman who pisses off the cops. Intercut with her jaw-dropping travails is the discovery by an initially sceptical good cop (Michael Kelly) of a child-murdering psycho who operated on a remote ranch and may well have killed Collins' real son. After a crusading preacher (John Malkovich) who's on a campaign against police corruption gets Collins sprung from the asylum, the film's storylines converge more closely, as Collins seeks justice for herself and tries to discern her beloved son's true fate.

The performance of Angelina Jolie as Christine Collins is one of her best in years; no doubt channelling some fierce maternal instinct but at the same time dialing things down quite a bit, she very nearly transcends her somewhat otherworldly physical appearance and embodies a classic heroine. As nemesis Jones, Donovan shows his teeth a little too fiercely; as a friend observed, people don't actually get up in the morning relishing the idea of how evil they're going to be, the way this guy does. Far more evocative of heinous soul-crushing bureaucracy at its most rotted is Denis O'Hare's slimy asylum head. Amy Ryan is her usual goods-delivering self as an inmate who hips Collins to the loony bin's secret purpose, and her exchanges with Jolie flesh out the film's powerful feminist sub-theme. I still haven't quite processed Jason Butler Harner's work as the genuinely deranged child-killer, but his final confrontations with Jolie do add up.

For once, Eastwood's musical score is a little inapt—the modal format and the instrumentation seem kind of anachronistic, and the music's not as sparely used as it's been in other recent works of his. But hell. The directorial mastery here culminates in a genuinely wrenching coda set in a police station, which brought real unashamed tears to my eyes.

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