Changeling: True Crime from Clint and Angelina

Hollywood royalty from different generations — Clint Eastwood, 78, as director-producer and Angelina Jolie, 33, as star — strike an agreeable but uneasy artistic entente in the period drama Changeling. When the movie had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this May, the two were instantly dubbed Clangelina, and they looked quite the handsome couple on the red carpet. But this bustling, complex picture is hobbled by something neither an Academy Award-winning director nor a seductive star can overcome: miscasting.

Changeling is an epic, fact-based story — depicting sadistic, systematic corruption in the municipal government, the police department and the medical establishment of 1920s Los Angeles — that has the novelty of being virtually unknown today. The script, by TV writer-producer J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5, Jeremiah), juggles elements of L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, The Snake Pit and any number of serial-killer thrillers. But at its center are the heartache and heroic resolve of a woman who has lost the person she loves most and is determined to find him, dead or alive, against all obstacles the authorities place in her way. In that sense the movie is a companion piece to last year’s A Mighty Heart, in which Jolie played the wife of kidnapped journalist Daniel Pearl — except that Changeling is far more sprawling and twisty.

Christine Collins (Jolie) works as a supervisor at Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, where she patrols the operator bank on roller skates. She’s a conscientious employee, but her life is devoted to her nine-year-old son Walter (Gattlin Griffith), whose father walked out when the child was born. One day Christine returns home to find Walter missing. As the days and months drag on, his disappearance becomes big news, and when word comes that the boy has been located, the press is there en masse at the train station. Instantly she sees that this “Walter” (Devon Conti) is not her son; but the police insist that he’s Walter — case closed.

The officer in charge, Capt. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), dismisses Christine’s evidence of differences between the two boys: this one is a few inches shorter, his dental records don’t match Walter’s, his teacher doesn’t recognize him… and he’s been circumcised! When Christine presses her objections, Jones has her confined to the psychopathic ward of the Los Angeles Hospital, in the company of other women with the potential to embarrass the cops. (“If we’re insane,” says Amy Ryan as a prostitute subjected to electroshock therapy for her outspokenness, “nobody has to listen to us.”) Her only ally is a preacher and radio crusader, Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), who sees Christine’s case as another heinous example of the police department’s venality.

Meanwhile, a vagrant boy (Eddie Alderson, the best of a very strong bunch of child actors here) directs a police detective to a chicken ranch in Wineville, about 40 miles west of L.A. There, a Canadian named Gordon Northcott (nicely played by Jason Butler Harner as a man who tries to hide his darkest impulses under the aw-shucks amiability of a Gary Cooper rube) has committed atrocities on some 20 kidnapped boys. Are these crimes related to Walter’s disappearance? And if so, will the cops bring the matter into the glare of publicity, or suppress the awful information?

A movie with all these gruesome elements could easily be sensational. Maybe this one should have been. Maybe the telling should have a little flair, and a headlong rush toward dreadful truths. But that’s not Eastwood’s way. He just wants to tell the story, in uninflected, police-procedural fashion; the movie is like a flatfoot following a suspicious trail with no special intuition but an admirable doggedness. It doesn’t hurtle, it ambles. You will find, on the Internet, documentation about the Wineville Chicken Coop matter, and the criminality of then-Mayor George Cryer as a pawn of the Crawford mob, of the L.A.-wide corruption that makes Al Capone’s Chicago a shining city on a hill by comparison. Eastwood is after just the facts, ma’am. Weaving all the true-crime elements into a film of multilayered, Chinatown density either doesn’t interest Eastwood and Straczynski or is beyond their skill set. The motto seems to be: lay it out; get it done.

Eastwood has always been a prolific auteur, and never more so than in his twilight years. Since turning 70 in 2000, he’s released eight films as a director, including the Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby and a feature-length documentary, Piano Blues. On Christmas Day there’ll be another movie, Gran Torino, which he stars in as well as directing. He couldn’t do this if he didn’t work fast (and relatively cheap). Screenwriters love him; if he likes a script, he shoots it without demanding a million rewrites. Actors love him too; if he likes Take One, he prints it and goes on to the next scene. Decisiveness is fine, but it raises the question: What does it take to satisfy Clint Eastwood? Sometimes the answer is: Not much.

Or too much, as here in Jolie’s high emoting. With flaring red lipstick on a face that hasn’t seen much time in the California sun, and with a grieving matched in severity only by her will to learn the truth, Jolie is supposed to be a regular working mom who rises to meet the challenge of dreadful events. The actress is capable of many things, but being ordinary isn’t one of them. Jolie seems to know that her startling, cartoonish, monumental beauty is a handicap here, so she goes bigger in her movements. A stream of tears stains her Kabuki makeup; her sighs come with shrugs worthy of Atlas. Underplaying would have helped. So would the casting of an actress who’s less glamorous and, I have to say, more human — someone like Naomi Watts.

As the story expands, and finds new avenues of real-life horror, Jolie can coast on the narrative instead of having to push it with her grit and grimaces. The film becomes an ensemble piece, with a dozen or so character actors carrying the storyline. Finally, Changeling — like most Eastwood movies — is exactly as good as its makings. In its purposeful accumulation of depravities, both individual and institutional, the director’s non-style has an honorable payoff that’s rare in modern Hollywood cinema: the story’s weight could come close to burying you in despair.

You may ask: There’s that much evil in the world? And Clint, thinking more about storytelling craft than about Oscar nominations, would say, Sure. But there are heroes too. And this time, the righteous gunslinger is a mom with no weapon but her inexhaustible love.