Changeling
Clint Eastwood (2008)
The front cover of this September’s Sight and Sound has a photograph of Clint Eastwood and beneath it the question: ‘The greatest living American director?’ Tempting as it is to give a facetious answer, the right one must be: how is it possible that this question is even asked? Except for Savage Grace, Changeling is the worst new film I’ve seen this year. I understand why there’s a sizeable audience for Eastwood films: he chooses compelling, melodramatic storylines and his clear, primitive depiction of character – people are usually goodies or baddies – is naturally popular. Although this black-and-white moral universe may have its roots in the Westerns and crime-and-violence thrillers in which Eastwood specialised in his early years as a director, he has increasingly varied the time and place settings of his films; and has shrewdly found ways of widening his audience demographic. Films like Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby and Changeling are offered (and swallowed) as explorations of character, as something more than genre pictures – but not so much more that they’ll scare off the traditional Eastwood clientele.
There had been few sizeable roles for women in Eastwood pictures until he made The Bridges of Madison County (which – as a ‘woman’s picture’ – was perhaps his most subversive work to date). Changeling, like Million Dollar Baby, has a female character at its centre – but she’s a woman fighting, even if not literally this time, in a man’s world. The features of his work I’ve summarised above also largely explain Eastwood’s Oscar success: as well as his own two wins for directing, his films have twice won Best Picture and no less than five actors in them (so far) have won Academy Awards. That last statistic is remarkable, given how badly Eastwood directs actors, but it’s comprehensible to the extent that the roles are ‘meaty’ in obvious ways – ways with which the Academy feels comfortable. (Changeling’s critical reception appears to be more mixed than other recent Eastwood films yet it’s still being talked of as an Oscar possible. It may well be eclipsed by his second film of 2008, Gran Torino, for which Eastwood has already been named as Best Actor in the National Board of Review awards.) What I can’t understand is how Clint Eastwood has come to be so admired by film critics, to be taken seriously by something that takes itself as seriously as Sight and Sound. It’s not just that he has the artistic sensibility of a pig’s backside; his films seem to be deficient in really basic ways.
The opening credits of Changeling announce, self-confidently, that it’s a ‘true story’ (nothing as qualified as ‘based on’ or ‘suggested by’ a true story). Set in Los Angeles in the last years of the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, it’s about Christine Collins, a young single mother, who works as a switchboard supervisor. In March 1928, Christine’s nine-year-old son Walter disappears from home. After nearly five months of silence, the LA Police Department informs Christine that Walter has turned up safe and well in Illinois. When she goes to be reunited with her son, Christine realises immediately that the child is not Walter. Captain Jones, the LAPD officer in charge of the case, tells her she’s mistaken (Walter has changed a bit in the time he’s been gone, Christine is understandably overcome by his reappearance, etc) – and she takes the child home. Over (what turns out to be) the next few days, Christine keeps pleading with Jones to believe her – and to keep searching for the real Walter. She provides what might seem to be unanswerable physical evidence that she’s right: the new Walter is circumcised, unlike the original; a mark that Christine recently drew on the living room wall after measuring the real Walter’s height shows him to have been three inches taller than his replacement. Her child’s dentist and schoolteacher say they’re prepared to back her up. Christine also attracts the interest of Gustav Briegleb, a Presbyterian minister, well known in the city for his tireless attempts – from the pulpit and in radio broadcasts – to expose the corruption of the LAPD, which is evidently already notorious.
Moments after she’s first talked to the press about her situation, Christine is locked up by Jones in a mental asylum. Lester Ybarra, a good cop, goes to a ranch in Riverside County to arrange for a teenage boy, who’s hiding out there, to be sent back to Canada. While he’s being held before deportation, the boy, Sanford Clark, insists on telling Ybarra what went on at the farm: Sanford’s thirtyish cousin, Gordon Northcott, toured the neighbourhood in a jeep, abducting a total of about twenty young boys. He held them in hen coops on the farm, before murdering them, usually with an axe; the numbed, helpless Sanford sometimes assisted with ‘finishing them off’, including the burials. Sanford is shown photographs of missing children by Ybarra and identifies several, Walter Collins among them, as Northcott’s victims. Back in the asylum, Christine soon learns that the LAPD are locking up a range of female troublemakers. Her will doesn’t break – she continues to refuse to sign a statement agreeing that the boy returned to her is her son – and, through Briegleb’s good offices, she’s released (as are, it seems very soon afterwards, all the other women being held there against their will). Gordon Northcott himself crosses the border back into Canada and is arrested virtually on arrival and returned to LA to go on trial. (Sanford Clark simply disappears from the story.) At the same time, courtroom hearings expose the full extent of LAPD malpractices: Jones is banned from the police for life; the chief of police is sacked. Northcott spends two years on death row in San Quentin before being hanged. Shortly before his execution, he asks to see Christine, who has never given up hope that the real Walter might return; yet, when they meet, Northcott still refuses to admit whether or not he murdered the boy. After Northcott’s hanging, the action moves forward to February 1935 for the final part of the film. Another of the boys who went missing years ago turns up and is reunited with his parents as Christine watches. In the closing scene, she tells Ybarra that she can live with not being certain what became of Walter – that the uncertainty gives her hope.
The fact that these things really happened does makes them astonishing. But Clint Eastwood seems not to be interested in trying to penetrate the extraordinary experience of a mother who not only loses her child but then has to live with – and finds herself hating – a different boy who’s officially her own lost son. It must have been hard at times for Christine Collins to believe what was happening to her. She may even have felt she was going mad – and then found herself in a mental hospital against her will. The sequence of events – the friction of these events with her longing to see her child again – is a true nightmare. It’s offensive that Changeling, which cries out for a sensitive, character-driven approach, gets a purely plot-driven one – with slabs of brutal melodrama and wedges of sentimentality. Eastwood and the screenwriter J Michael Straczynski duck the challenge of describing Christine and the impostor child in their bad- joke ménage à deux. There are a couple of flashy nuggets of conflict but no sense of the accumulating, horrifying misery of the life the woman and the boy are sharing hour after hour, day after day. Christine must have pressed ‘Walter’ for evidence that he’s the genuine article, then tried to find out how he came forward and got presented as her son. Eastwood’s and Straczynski‘s idea of dealing with her curiosity is to have her scream at the boy ‘Who are you?’ (he doesn’t reply) and leave it at that.
It’s a familiar cheat in films that want to showcase a main character’s isolation to present her or him as virtually without any human contact; doing this allows the film-makers to get on with the story without having to devote time or thought to the potential complication of other aspects of the character’s world or personality. Christine is not just a single mother – she evidently has no family or friends and virtually no contact with her neighbours. There’s a plausible pretext for this: she has a job and a child – we’re supposed to believe there’s no time for anything else in her life. But, once the new Walter arrives on the scene, this lack of contact is exposed not just as an omission for the sake of convenience – but also as a key example of the lack of information which the film’s plot requires in order to keep afloat. Doesn’t Christine ask parents or kids in the same street if they think Walter has really come back? There are other questions conspicuous by their absence. Do the police not have a story of how the boy they’ve turned up spent the last five months? Were there photographs of the missing Walter in the newspapers (there’s obviously a photograph for Sanford Clark to identify as Walter)? If so, did no one in Los Angeles, when they saw a press photo of Christine meeting the boy at the railway station, remark on the child’s lack of resemblance to earlier pictures? It seems crucial to ask that last question especially – if the answer to it is no that might say something worth saying about the public’s ability to deceive itself in order to reassure itself. The screenplay is so shallow and omissive that Changeling is weak even as a conventional mystery, let alone as a portrait of a mother being told that she doesn’t recognise her own child.
The treatment of the story and the characters is dualistic in a very crass way: as a battle of light and darkness, Changeling is completely lacking in suspense. It never begins to suggest the operation of a systemically corrupt organisation: the evil forces in the film are animated purely by the vicious behaviour (and facial expressions) of individual characters and by hideous, monotonous overplaying in these roles – from Jason Butler Hamer as Northcott, Jeffrey Donovan as Jones, and Colm Feore as the LAPD chief. Eastwood and Straczynski don’t bother to provide the LAPD with any ammunition to make us wonder for a second if they could be right and Christine wrong. When Christine goes to enlist the support of the schoolteacher, all the other kids in the class seem to be laughing at the child who’s pretending to be Walter: there’s no follow-up to this – the scene seems to be there just to emphasise how ridiculous the police’s position is. (For his part, Jones can offer nothing more than a doctor who suggests to Christine that Walter might have been circumcised by his abductor and sufficiently traumatised by the abduction to shrink vertically.) In a similar way, there are garishly (and conventionally) overdone scenes of maltreatment in the mental asylum so that the audience knows the people responsible for this must be very bad people. Yet Eastwood is impatient for the relatively feelgood moment of Christine’s liberation: all it takes to achieve this is the man of God marching up to the reception desk of this hellish prison and demanding that she be freed or else (or else what?) The good are so self-righteous and the bad are punished in such a tediously punitive way that, in the LAPD hearings sequence, I actually started feeling sorry for Jones; the massed ranks of seekers after truth and justice, with Clint Eastwood at their head, seemed to have been ganging up on him for so long.
To what extent, exactly, is this film a true story? Is it true, for example, that the morning before her son disappeared, Christine Collins – a few seconds after the alarm clock has woken her – decided to measure his height and make a mark on the wall in the process of manoeuvring him, still half asleep, to the breakfast table? Or true that the LAPD hearings took place in the same building at the same time as the trial of the serial child killer Northcott – so that Christine and her team could nip out of one room and into the one next door, always at just the right time to catch the highlights? (This may just be what’s implied by clumsy cross-cutting but it is implied.) Is it true that, when Northcott was hanged, the black sack was placed over his head and there followed an interval sadistically long enough for the condemned man to sing a verse of ‘Silent Night’ in a terrified crackpot falsetto before the trap door opened? I expect it’s true that Christine did mark Walter’s height on the wall just before he disappeared. But the way the film incorporates this seems completely false – even as it’s happening, let alone when you realise that Straczynski and Eastwood had to plant the detail of the height mark for future reference. It’s certainly not true that Christine listened to the radio broadcast of the 1935 Academy Awards and the voice announcing Best Picture uttered the famous words, ‘May I have the envelope please?’ Eastwood’s undeserved familiarity with receiving Oscars might lead you to think this is one area in which he’d be reliable; according to Robert Osborne’s history of the awards, the ‘surprise element’ was an innovation at the 1941 show.
These may seem minor details but they seem to me to epitomise the way the whole screenplay works: never mind if an event or a character is distorted or traduced. This is a true story: full stop. (That claim reads like the obverse blanket assurance of ‘Any resemblance to persons living or dead … ‘ – and no more convincing than that negative disclaimer has often been.) According to the Wikipedia article on Changeling (this is – inexplicably – the longest Wikipedia article for a single film I’ve so far seen), J Michael Straczynski lifted much of the screenplay ‘direct from Los Angeles public records’. He also inserted newspaper clippings in copies of the script to keep reminding Eastwood and the cast that ‘this was all true’. If that piece of information itself is true, it suggests a breathtaking arrogance on the part of a debutant screenwriter. In order not to despise Straczynski even more than I already do on the strength of this film, I’d prefer to see those clippings as an expression of self-doubt in some part of his mind – a fear that the actors would disbelieve the script not because it describes improbable events but because it renders them in an incredible way. Does all this matter? I think it does – and not just because of the opening true story boast: Clint Eastwood is working in – and is often praised for adding lustre to – a tradition of narrative dramatic realism.
The dialogue seems to have been written on auto-pilot. A lawyer found by Briegleb tells Christine he’ll be proud to act on her behalf, that he’s never in fifteen years met anyone who’s so committed, and has been committed for so long, to seeing justice being done. (He looks to be in his sixties so seems to have entered the profession quite late in life, but let that pass.) This conversation takes place less than two months after the changeling child has appeared on the scene: has the lawyer really never had a client keen for more than a few weeks on obtaining justice? The sequencing of scenes is sometimes laughable. The judge condemns Northcott to two years in San Quentin, and death by hanging once the two years are up at the end of September 1930. A new date comes up on the screen – late September 1930 – and we see Christine back at work. Her lawyer appears round the door (he was obviously hanging around the set). About a minute’s screen time after we’ve heard the judge’s sentence, the lawyer helpfully tells her and us: ‘As you know, Northcott is to be hanged in San Quentin jail at the beginning of October … ‘. After listening to the Academy Awards show after work one evening, Christine takes a phone call and says she’ll go straight along to Lincoln Heights. She arrives in broad daylight – has she been travelling all night?
It’s silly that a serious dramatic performance from Angelina Jolie attracts per se attention and surprised admiration. She could have made a dozen Lara Croft films and she would still have shown irrefutably, in Girl, Interrupted, that she’s a good actress. Although the character of Christine is thinly written, Jolie plays her sympathetically, discreetly, with integrity. If she seizes a bit too eagerly on the opportunities for an emotional outburst, that’s understandable because the opportunities are so few. What may get overlooked in her performance – because it’s being hyped as a ‘thoughtful’ one – is the extent to which she is using her body to characterise Christine; her movement is both fluid and guarded. John Malkovich’s individuality – with the help of a striking succession of pullovers – makes the guardian angel minister a little more eccentric than this saintly man must have read in the script. Malkovich has more difficulty in suggesting a Christian believer – his task is made more difficult by the fact that Eastwood and Straczynski ignore that side of Briegleb to such an extent that you wonder whether the minister does religious services, as opposed to fighting-for-justice-and-unmasking-corruption sermons, at all. However, Malkovich does a creditable job with a speech to Christine about her being reunited with Walter in heaven.
I remember feeling uneasy in the very first scene of Mystic River: it seemed to me that the three boys playing in the street (the boys who grow up to be the Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon characters) were acting artificially – as if they knew what was coming later in the film. Eastwood’s direction of two of the juveniles in Changeling results in something similar. I expect that Eddie Alderson as Sanford Clark will be especially praised for his ‘mature’ performance; it seemed to me precociously studied (and hollow) – and it’s repeated, in his one-scene appearance, by Asher Axe (an unfortunate name, in the circumstances), as another long-lost boy who really does return near the end of the film. The two Walters – Gattlin Griffith (real) and Devon Conti (fake) – are both more effective. Among the large cast of adults, the overacting in this film is so consistent that you have to blame the director. Among the actors whom you know can do better than this are Amy Ryan (a prostitute locked in the asylum) and Denis O’Hare (the chief doctor there). The one real pleasure of Changeling for me was Michael Kelly in the role of Ybarra, partly because he managed to create a believable and believably ambivalent human being, partly because I’d not seen this actor before. If he can be as persuasive as this with Clint Eastwood behind the camera, Kelly could be really good if he gets to work with someone other than America’s greatest living director.
There was also one trivial pleasure – even though I know it’s bad to feel this kind of negative satisfaction. Every so often, I kept noticing the music – not because it was any good but because its wet, simpering quality was so at odds with the strong-arm histrionics on the screen: it was slightly interesting that it didn’t make any sense. I wondered how it had come to be chosen and who was responsible for the score so I stayed long enough to see the credit: music by Clint Eastwood.
1 December 2008