Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Clint Eastwood knows, and in the brooding, disturbing "Changeling," he puts that knowledge on screen and combines it with a testament to the strength of a mother's hope and love.
If that sounds like an unusual combination, the unexpected has become standard operating procedure for Eastwood, a director whose five-film, five-year run, from "Mystic River" in 2003 to this film today, has been the most consistently powerful and affecting force on the American movie scene.
Though "Changeling" stars actress of the moment Angelina Jolie, Eastwood's films are invariably old-fashioned, in the best sense, in that they are concerned with telling a story. Increasingly over this last five years the stories told have darkened, and "Changeling" unfolds with a melancholy fatalism, a sense of evil so pervasive it takes an act of will to believe that the persistence of goodness can make a difference.
Even the film's title, referring to folkloric tales of infants secretly swapped by malicious fairies, has an unnerving, disorienting quality that fits "Changeling's" daylight ghost story sensibility. For this is a film willing to be, as Eastwood himself said when it debuted at Cannes, "a horror story for adults, not for thrill-seeking kids."
Based on real Los Angeles events and taken from a script by J. Michael Straczynski, best known for TV's science fiction "Babylon 5," "Changeling" underlines its adult nature with the quiet yet steely deliberation it employs in setting the scene of Los Angeles in 1928.
It's almost as if Eastwood, using his own gently melodic score and Tom Stern's beautiful cinematography, wants to initially lull us into getting sentimental for the good old days, when the Lincoln Heights neighborhood east of downtown was neat as a pin and the Red Cars ran to the sea. But if you look closely, Stern's rich colors are not really bright but muted, almost somber, as if our sunny days are never sunny enough to dispel the shadows that lurk underneath.
"Changeling" opens with an ordinary Friday morning for single mother Christine Collins (Jolie) and her 9-year-old son, Walter (Gattlin Griffith). She drops him off at school and then goes on to her job supervising phone operators at Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, where she manages to be all business despite having to do her job, as was the practice back in the day, on roller skates.
