The Lost Boy

Angelina Jolie's unrelenting intensity lacks human emotion in Clint Eastwood's Changeling.

by Sam Adams

GONE IN 60 SECONDS: Angelina Jolie plays a mother whose son disappears and is convinced the boy returned to her is not her own. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

For much of Changeling, Clint Eastwood keeps Angelina Jolie hidden from view. Her eyes obscured by a drooping felt hat, or her face shadowed by an umbrella, Jolie's intensity is dimmed but hardly obscured.

As Christine Collins, a single mother whose 9-year-old son vanishes one March day in 1928, Jolie moves quickly from frantic to feral as she finds herself battling a corrupt Los Angeles police force more interested in closing the case than finding her child. As she has shown most recently in Wanted, Jolie is adept at animal instinct, sometimes tempered with a hint of sultry disdain, but human emotions still seem to elude her. She blazes through every scene at full strength, so the only thing Eastwood can do to temper her performance is to construct the cinematic equivalent of an eclipse viewer, shielding us so our eyes don't burn out.

Not that Changeling has much interest in modulation overall. Like most of Eastwood's latter-day movies, it's directed in the style of an old master, high-toned and serious even when dealing with material that eventually turns almost unbearably lurid. But there's something paradoxically ostentatious about Eastwood's restraint, and his dogged consistency of tone. It's one grand swelling chord from beginning to end.

Changeling's script, by J. Michael Straczynski, is based on a true story which dovetails neatly with Eastwood's interest in upending simplistic notions of right and wrong. On one side is Christine, aided by an opportunistic radio preacher named Gustvav Briegleb (John Malkovich); on the other, the legions of law enforcement, represented mainly by Capt. J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan). At first, the police are eager to solve the case, but when they mistakenly deliver the wrong boy, they're unwilling to submit to the public humiliation of admitting their error. When a desperate Christine tries to protest that the child is not her son, Jones advises her to "take him home on a trial basis."

Out of her mind with grief and dazed by the whirl of news photographers, Christine briefly acquiesces, and when she tries to press the police to continue looking for her son, they insist that they've already found him. She threatens to go public, and they have her committed to a mental institution, where other women who have dared to question the police have been locked up for years.

The manifest injustice of Christine Collins' story allows Jolie the opportunity to play through a range of Oscar-worthy emotions, but it also hamstrings the movie. Eastwood treats the story like a sober morality play, but there's nothing really at stake. The heroes and villains are set out from the start, and, apart from the mid-film emergence of a new supporting player, nothing causes us to rethink our terms. Malkovich plays Briegleb like an oily manipulator, but the other shoe never drops; he's as virtuous as he appears to be. The police, with the exception of one dedicated detective, are unreservedly venal, shamelessly trying to fracture Christine's already battered psyche.

Changeling's monotonous sobriety is broken only by a pair of supporting performances. As a fellow psycho-ward inmate, Amy Ryan contributes a life and sharpness absent from Jolie's perpetual agony. And virtual unknown Jason Butler Harner walks off with the movie's second half. (Explaining his role requires divulging a major plot point, so you've been warned.) The disappearance of Christine's son eventually intersects with a particularly noxious bit of local history known as the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. A search for another missing child led the police to a rural ranch owned by Gordon Northcott (Harner), who turns out to be responsible for the torture and murder of more than a dozen young boys.

Northcott's discovery twists Changeling in a wildly new direction. Harner's gangly, slope-shouldered presence contrasts sharply with Jolie's stoic invulnerability. His mercurial mood shifts, from searing anger to childlike vulnerability, are unpredictable and a little frightening, and absorbing in a way Jolie's performance rarely is. It takes a killer to bring the movie to life.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Changeling | Directed by Clint Eastwood | A Universal Pictures release