January 6, 2009: Changeling
OK, so call me illiterate, but I didn’t know what the word Changeling meant when I started watching this movie. As it turns out, I didn’t know the definition by the end of the movie either, so I never really came to accept what it was about, and that may have affected my experience. It seems that a changeling is a child or thing believed to have been secretly substituted for another, and NOT an alien shapeshifter which can transform, or “change” into other things at will. I kept waiting for this little kid to change into a monster or something. It never happened.
So the movie is based on a true story about a Los Angeles woman (Angelina Jolie) in the 1920s whose son goes missing, and when he is miraculously returned by the LAPD, it turns out to be the wrong kid. The LAPD was suffering from bad publicity at the time, and to admit such an error would be disastrous, so they covered up the issue, even going so far as to have the mother committed to a mental institution for evidently not recognizing her own child. But then there turns out to be someone kidnapping and murdering young boys, and it’s possible that the woman’s boy was kidnapped by this monster (see, there was one in the movie!). As with most such cases, publicity helps to uncover the details and we find out in the end what actually happened.
I was reminded a fair bit of L.A. Confidential (1997), being a 20th century period film based around hatred of the LAPD, and showing the unglamorous day-to-day life in times and places which are often romanticized.
This is more Clint Eastwood Oscar bait, released in late October in time for awards season, and it was duly nominated for Best Actress for Angelina Jolie as the mother, as well as for the cinematography and art direction for this beautiful period piece. Eastwood’s other big awards-trolling picture, Gran Torino, was completely passed over by the Academy this year, but rest assured that he’ll be back again. Angelina Jolie won a surprise Supporting Actress Oscar for the Winona Ryder movie Girl, Interrupted (1999), and it seems that she’s been trying ever since to prove that she’s a real actress and that it wasn’t just a fluke. Her work generally strikes me as being uneven, and in most roles I don’t forget that I’m looking at Angelina Jolie, but sometimes she really pulls it off. For me, this wasn’t one of those roles where she pulls it off.
As I mentioned, the movie looks great. Cinematographer Tom Stearn has done most of Clint Eastwood’s movies since 2002, and he has mastered that rich, flowing look Eastwood seems to favour these days – you can see real parallels to Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby here. There’s obvious colour desaturation as well as emphasis of certain colours to bring us a deliberately stylized 1920s look, which generally works but might lose a bit too much detail and realism in pursuit of that particular look. As with any big period piece, I find it difficult to immerse myself in the time, because I find the magnitude of the production design simply staggering – tracking down all the old vehicles and setting up streetscapes without modern buildings or signs, and having cluttered interiors with reproductions or originals of all kinds of mundane objects, all in the appropriate condition for their time. I find it easier to immerse myself in period pieces set prior to the 20th century, where it’s more likely that there are some horse-drawn carriage exteriors which can be handled relatively easily, and all the interiors are in slightly modified historic homes which have been restored or preserved exactly as they would have been in their time. That way, I don’t need to worry myself about how difficult a job the set designer must have had. L.A. in the 1920s is not nearly so easy to reproduce! Add in the digital effects available today, and it can be distracting to figure out what’s real and what’s not. Did they really install a whole bunch of streetcar tracks in L.A. locations, or was it a back lot, or were the streetcars entirely faked up? It’s fun to puzzle over all this, but I seriously doubt that the filmmakers want me to be distracted by it.
So what about this movie? Well, it seemed to be headed toward some solid characterization, and the story was certainly compelling up to a point, but the pacing was odd and the focus of the movie wandered around too much. I certainly felt that seeing this was well worth my while, but somehow the whole thing just didn’t gel. It seemed to want to focus on Jolie as the desperate mother at the centre of the story, but delved into lots of detail about what was happening to the kidnapped boys and made it seem for long periods that that was actually what the movie was about. I might have preferred that as the focus, but it would be a very different movie. Also, there was a bunch of time spent on Jolie’s job at a telephone operator’s office, but minimal payoff to justify the intrusion into the film. John Malkovich as the preacher generating publicity was well-cast, but grossly underused. Character actors playing some of the LAPD roles really got into their parts, but the movie wasn’t willing to admit to being an ensemble piece as L.A. Confidential clearly was. I have to proclaim this as being too muddled for an unqualified recommendation.
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