Movie Review – Changeling
My wife and I just got back from seeing Changeling. I have to agree with Roger Ebert:
Jolie plays Christine Collins without unnecessary angles or quirks. She is a supervisor at the telephone company, she loves her son, they live in a nice bungalow, all is well. She reacts to her son’s disappearance as any mother would. But as weeks turn into months, and after the phony “son” is produced, her anger and resolution swells up until it brings the whole LAPD fabrication crashing down. Malkovich as the minister is refreshing: He’s not a sanctimonious grandstander who gets instructions directly from God, but a crusading activist.
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Eastwood’s telling of this story isn’t structured as a thriller, but as an uncoiling of outrage. It is clear that the leaders of the LAPD serve and protect one thing: its own tarnished reputation. Collins joins many other female prisoners whose only crime was to annoy a cop. The institution drugs them, performs shock treatment, punishes any protest. Mental illness is treated as a crime. This is all, as the film observes, based on a true story.
Eastwood is one of the finest directors now at work. I often say I’m mad at Fassbinder for dying at 38 and denying us decades of his films. In a way, I’m also mad at Eastwood for not directing his first film until he was 41. We could not do without his work as an actor. But most of his greatest films as a director have come after “retirement age.” Some directors start young and get tired. Eastwood is only gathering steam.
It’s a damned good film.
I saw it because A) it’s directed by Eastwood, and B) it was written by J. Michael Straczynski – the guy who conceived, wrote and brought to life Babylon 5. What an interesting partnership that had to be. I was not disappointed.
This is not an edge-of-your-seat thriller, but – if for no other reason – I recommend it to readers of my blog because you need to see what unfettered police power, Cartman’s “RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!” can really, has really produced here in America’s history.
It can happen here. It has happened here.