✯✯✯✯ 1/2
Clint Eastwood's Changeling is a capsule that perfectly keeps its period intact, keeping its audience drawn into its emotionally charged mystery. The real mystery isn't so much where Christine Collins' son is, but rather what happened to him. We know that he went missing- we don't know if he ran away or was removed by force. What we do know is that the child the police brought back to her is in fact not her son. He's too short, he doesn't remember things that he should, and the physical features don't add up. The police, of course, vehemently deny this fact and eventually have Ms. Collins taken to a psychiatric hospital, all the while she is still going mad with worry about her son's well-being.
The period is the late 1920's. Every last piece of this film doesn't slip anything to the contrary of this fact. Women, of course, were much more oppressed in the time by the supposedly corrupt LAPD, despite work environments beginning to show changes in their favor. The stubborn police chief believes that she has gone psychotic and convinced herself that her son is still out there. But the child has been confirmed by several police doctors to be her son. What could she possibly have that the police don't that proves otherwise? Unfortunately, the social and scientific advances of the time were far too primitive to provide conclusive evidence to the contrary, and so she is forced to either care for this stranger in her home or be committed to a psychiatric institute. Of course, her motherly instincts drive her towards the latter, setting in motion a course of events that will change the very fabric of history itself.
Changeling is an intense and heart-wrenching true story that seems perfectly adapted for the screen. Angelina Jolie slides comfortably into the role of the oppressed protagonist, and she seems to be excellent at expanding her acting abilities more than I had previously thought. As with Eastwood's abilities, Jolie's acting talent only seems to get finer and finer with her age (and yes, I did like Salt). Unlike Jolie though, Eastwood has proven to be a formidable director, somewhat surpassing his previously established reputation as a classic film actor. Newer releases like this and Gran Torino show me that he has taken his expertise and experience and matured it into a fantastic directorial ability. I always look forward to what he's going to be directing next, somewhat more than I look forward to the next Christopher Nolan release nowadays. Nolan is great in his own right, but all his films have the same theme of telling multiple plots at the same time, frequently cutting back and forth between the two stories (see: Interstellar and The Dark Knight). It was a great plot device that worked to a few of his films' advantages, but it's a little more than tiring at this point. Eastwood doesn't try to distract us with having three different plots going on at once, rather keeping us focused on what we want to know: what happened to the boy? It's a riveting and dramatic mystery that will keep you entranced and entangled until the very end- I guarantee it.