Changeling

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched Changeling the Clint Eastwood movie.

The story is ‘a true story’ based on a famous case in Los Angeles from the 1920s. In 1928 single mom Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), having promised her son they would go to the movies, instead has to work. When she gets home that night, her son is gone. She looks everywhere but he’s gone. The police try to find him, no good. But Collins is persistent, and her case attracts the attention of Reverend Gebleit (I probably spelled that wrong – John Malkovitch plays him) who is a crusader against the violent, corrupt LAPD. And he uses the case to ridicule the LAPD for incompetence along with violence and corruption.

Five months after she loses her son, Collins is told by the police that her boy Walter has been found in Iowa. They will meet him at the train station. There the Police Captain Jones and a gaggle of reporters are on hand to make the most of the publicity – the LAPD reuniting mother and missing child. But when she sees the kid, Collins says it’s not her son. The Captain, faced with the reporters, talks her into taking the kid home on a ‘trial basis’ for a couple weeks; the ordeal has changed him, he looks different, and if she doesn’t take care of him nobody will. Reluctantly Collins agrees, and the reporters all swarm around to take pictures of the happy family.

Collins grows more and more sure that this is not her son. She tries to tell this to Captain Jones, bringing evidence – the new kid is shorter, he is circumcised and her son wasn’t, the teacher knows he’s not the same, the dentist confirms it too. But the cops won’t listen, and even threaten her. At this point Collins lets the Reverend talk her into going to the press, but Captain Jones has her picked up and commits her in secret to a mental hospital.

There Collins is a prisoner, drugged, abused, and threatened. The doctor in charge is no more helpful or sympathetic than the cops, and uses double-talk to make her seem paranoid and unbalanced.

Meanwhile though, a detective finds up in a farm town outside LA (now called Mira Loma) evidence of a serial killer. Northcott, a Canadian, has forced his nephew to help him drive into LA, pick up boys, and bring them back to the farm, where Northcott cages them in the chicken coop before he chops them up with axes. Northcott has fled to Vancouver, but the nephew identifies Collins’s son Walter as one of the children he and Northcott abducted.

Collins is freed, and sues the city. Northcott is caught and brought back to trial. The two trials are held at the same time. As a result of the civil suit, Captain Jones is dismissed, the Chief made to resign, and the Mayor doesn’t run for re-election.

Two years later, just before he is hanged, Northcott telegrams Collins to tell her the truth about her son and how he killed him. Collins has refused to give up trying to find him, because maybe the nephew didn’t remember Walter right, and maybe Walter was one of the two or three kids who escaped. So she goes up to San Quentin penitentiary to meet Northcott. But he refuses to talk, and goes to the grave telling nothing.

Five years later (now it’s 1935) one of the missing boys turns up. He tells of the night he escaped. Two boys broke out, and he tried to follow, but got hung up on the chicken coop wire; one of the boys came back to help him – it was Walter Collins. The boy was separated from the other two, Walter and the other, as Northcott chased them. Since then the boy has been in hiding, afraid he might be accused of complicity.

Collins gains new hope from this news, and continues trying to find her son. She will spend the rest of her life in doing so, without success.

That’s the end of the movie. It’s a good period reconstruction, and Jolie is pretty good, taking at last a more mainstream, non-genre role. The guy playing Captain Jones, and the hospital doctor, are both great: Eastwood wants us to hate them and I sure did. The serial killer aspect of the story is downplayed, and emphasis centers on Christine Collins.

Here’s something interesting: this was a hot script that Brian Grazer and Ron Howard optioned for their Imagine company. Howard was supposed to direct, but he had two other pictures he wanted to do first, and so Grazer brought in Eastwood to do this; Eastwood says he likes to shoot pictures set in the Depression when he grew up. And his libertarian streak would lend himself to liking this story of how bad the cops and authorities can be. But Grazer and Howard had the screenwriter to a couple more drafts of the script, and Eastwood when he came on board went back to the first draft! He thought it had more heart and directness.

The problem I had with the script is – it covers too much ground. J. Michael Stracynzki (I probably spelled that wrong too – he’s most famous as the creator/producer of the TV show Babylon 5) just found too much in the real life stories that he liked, and was unable to let any of it go. In fact he did claim to let some of it go (for one thing, Northcott was aided in his crimes by his mother, but the mother is dropped) but once we leave Collins in the mental hospital and follow the investigation into the murders, the movie seems to be telling a different story. And then we have the two trials. And then we have the scenes of the hanging in San Quentin. And then we have the scenes from 5 years later. At some point it starts to feel as though this movie intends to tell the story of Los Angeles County for the next 80 years. It just doesn’t know when to stop.

Eastwood’s pace as usual is on the slow side. Well, old men make old men’s movies of course. But I wish they had concentrated just on the abuse of Collins and left it at that. Sam Fuller would have maybe left Collins in the psycho ward with the cops triumphant, and left it at that.

(22 April 2009)