A little boy is taken from his home in 1928. His mom enlists the LAPD to find him, and five months later they come up with a lost child. The mother quicky grasps that the kid isn’t her missing son, but the LAPD will have none of it. Outraged, Christine Collins takes on the entire police department in an effort to get them to look for her son, much to the detriment of her own welfare.
Oh, the arrogant LAPD! They foist a boy, obviously the wrong child, on poor Mrs. Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) and practically force her to shower affection on the kid. Then they wash their hands of the matter, even when Collins protests that the kid’s not hers. This attitude gets her thrown into a women’s sanitarium, because you just didn’t talk back to the LAPD in 1928, especially if you were a woman. Especially if you were a single woman who was pointing out a huge mistake on the part of the LAPD.
Luckily, Christine has a powerful ally, the Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), who broadcasts a weekly sermon excoriating the police for corruptioin and other misdeeds. Briegleb is instrumental in winning Christine’s release, but the battle’s only just begun: the cops are still crooked, and she is still without her son.
Concurrent to Christine’s problems, we also follow the story of the real kidnapper and of the upper management of the LAPD. What begins as a slight coverup on the part of the all-powerful police in order to placate a testy public and press turns into a disaster, all because Christine Collins wouldn’t give up.
The movie is never lacking for emotional realism. First of all, you completely empathize with Christine Collins, a woman who refuses to be a victim. Her goal isn’t to bring the police department down, and it’s not even to exact some kind of vengeance (which might just be a way for her to get over her son’s kidnapping). Her goal is simply to get her son back.
Angelina Jolie plays Christine Collins and is, in a word, outstanding, and she earned a Oscar nomination for this movie. Jolie’s Collins is not homely – you can’t completely lose that beauty, even if you’re playing a somewhat dowdy 1920s mom – but her looks don’t get her anywhere in this movie. To tell the truth, her looks are never even mentioned, not even in a snide comment by the cops (“Just sit over here, cutie, while we men take care of things”). When Collins comes home to find her son’s gone, we feel the anguish she feels. It doesn’t feel forced, and we don’t feel manipulated, and that’s at least because of Jolie herself.
One odd little complaint, though – why is everything so dark? Was the sun dimmer in 1928? Even in broad daylight, everyone seems to be half in shadows, which made me squint most of the time, thus giving me a headache. Was director Clint Eastwood trying for some kind of period moodiness? It’s not needed for most of the scenes, although the mental hospital should, by definition, be poorly lit.
As Christine Collins tenaciously clings to the idea that her son may still be alive, the movie also grabs a hold of your heartstrings and never lets go. But neither does Eastwood try to manipulate us toward an inevitable conclusion; he doesn’t pluck those heartstrings so much as gently caress them, ambiguously leading us in multiple directions. Collins’ predicament feels terrifyingly real: the aching loss of her only child and her own violent incarceration in a sadistic “hospital.” Changeling is frightening not only because of the blistering account of evil cops and doctors but also, and most hauntingly, because of the horrible anguish and despair Collins feels as she fights the system while maintaining her resolute belief that her boy will be found.
***1/2
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