Rare misfire from one of Hollywood’s legendary directors
Image Courtesy of IMPawards.com
Director: Clint Eastwood
Notable Cast: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan
Apparently a whole new genre came into existence seemingly overnight in Hollywood. Combine the prestige of a film aimed at the Academy Awards with a top rate actress screaming nonsensically all the time and you have at least half a dozen films in the last decade from all over the spectrum. Angelina Jolie seems to have cornered the market on it with A Mighty Heart in 2007 and Changeling in 2008.
Jolie stars as Christine Collins, a single mom in the 1920s whose son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) disappears. When the LAPD launches an investigation, headed up by Captain Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), they find her son in De Kalb, IL, and reunite the two of them. The problems begin when they return the wrong boy and pressure her to claim him as her own, as she launches her own investigation into the matter with the help of a local preacher (John Malkovich), leading into a set of events that churn the stomach.
While it may seem like a great original story from Clint Eastwood, the film is based off the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders in what is present day Mira Loma, California. Up to as many as 20 children under the age of 10 were killed there, and it’s still an unsolved mystery today as to whether or not Walter Collins survived. Real life Christine Collins never stopped looking for him and it remains a mystery as the killer never really confessed either. The film doesn’t focus on the atrocities of the murders, however, telling the story from Collins’ viewpoint and focusing more on her perspective as she tries to find her son.
It’s an interesting film for Eastwood, but he never really gets the film from interesting to engaging. He gets the time period right, getting down an incredible amount of detail, but he never really vests us into this world. It’s shocking from Eastwood, one of the great directors of his time and perhaps of all time, as that’s usually the forte of his film-making. The film smolders but never really lights on fire and draws us in, but that’s mainly more of an acting problem than a directing one. And it starts with Jolie.
One of the more accomplished actresses of her generation, Jolie seems to have two types of acting styles: sexy assassin for action films and whiny, crying woman for more dramatic parts. She spends the film in a sort of crying, yelling fit for large parts of it; in short bursts its powerful, but with the sheer volume of her crying fits it becomes more annoying than anything else. It’s a solid performance but not her best; it could be argued she was better earlier this year in Wanted, which is more of an indictment of this film than it would be of the aforementioned action flick.
Changeling seems to be screaming “give me an Oscar, again” from its director as opposed to trying to be a great film, which was the motif of Eastwood’s last two films about the Battle of Iwo Jima. While he gets the period right, he doesn’t get the story right.
