By Daniel Greenwood

This review contains spoilers.

Angelina Jolie will always make me sceptical of a film, particularly if the billboard advert for that film focuses on her illumined iris and pouting lips. In fact, this expression is near constant in Changeling, the latest feature from the once pistol-toting Clint Eastwood. Jolie is Christine Collins, a world away from Lara Croft and that bullet-bending broad in Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, 2008). Jolie seems to have built her career from her lips, and she’s done well to get here – Eastwood’s a good director.

Christine is called into work one afternoon, and having promised to take her son to the cinema she goes against her word by leaving him home alone. There’s a little suggestion here from Eastwood (though it is an historical account we’re dealing with) that work isn’t everything, and even the slightest imbalance between work and family life – in this case, just one covering shift – can lead to catastrophe. I would argue that the deciding factor is the unfair burden left with Christine by her son’s father, who ran away because he was afraid of the responsibility of parenthood (according to Christine). It’s not that she’s a woman that’s the problem, it’s the fact that she’s doing two people’s jobs at once – mothering and paying the bills. Later in the film, the police blame Christine for everything, and when they can’t point the finger at her, they try to blame the son. If you haven’t already guessed, Walter Collins, Christine’s son left at home, goes missing.

Sadly, it’s far more sinister than a simple disappearance, and Changeling does drift into some gruesome territory. In this instance I don’t necessarily mean the axe-wielding, blood-splattering scenes as the worst, they are, arguably, kind of funny. Really it’s the sequences featuring TV cop-show veteran Michael Kelly as Detective Lester Ybarra that are the most chilling. Detective Ybarra ventures onto an empty ranch and having unknowingly met a pivotal character on the way in, he investigates this run-down estate. Here, the chickens are maniacal and axes lie around on woodblocks. There’s something terribly threatening about this first scene at the ranch, and it’s once again a case of the American Frontier as the only place where certain horrors may take place. It’s not God-less though, in one bedroom is a dressing table with a bible lying open, beads and crucifixes nearby. I like Eastwood’s ambiguous suggestions, but not his over-eager infant-butchering – for stylistic reasons.

Back to Jolie – she is good in Changeling – and to refer to one recent review of her performance, it’s unfair to criticise her or Eastwood for the scene of Walter’s disappearance. Christine returns home and finds Walter isn’t there. She searches the house and the neighbourhood in a measured-way, not panicking or rushing to any conclusions. Christine calls the Police. Weeping, she reports her son’s disappearance. An officer informs her that a missing-persons report cannot be put out until that person has been missing for twenty-four hours. Christine reasons with the officer in quiet disbelief, and eventually places the phone down. It’s a disturbing scene, an example of legislation suited to serve a wider-cause but undermining an individual, critically. If Jolie really wanted the Oscar, surely she would have insisted to Eastwood on kicking and screaming.

There does feel like there’s something missing from this film, because it does see itself as an Oscar contender, if not a best-actress and best-director gig. It doesn’t match up with the sheer immediacy of There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007) nor the haunting No Country For Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007) and I only refer to these because they both deal with the Frontier, they each won Oscars, and There Will Be Blood stands as a near perfect period-piece – an area where Changeling does succeed.

Though this film may not stir everyone as an Oscar hopeful might, it remains an engrossing film that fits a wide spectrum of issues and emotions into its 140 minutes. Eastwood’s handling of these issues is commendable, balancing so as not to bore, nor to alienate as perhaps The Dark Knight did last August.

Rating: 7.6

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