Mom versus world

It's clear from just the brief time they have together that her son is the heart of Christine Collins' life, so much so that it bothers her when she's called in to work on Saturday because she will have to miss time she could spend with him. That bad feeling intensifies when Collins gets home late Saturday to find that Walter is nowhere to be found. She calls the Los Angeles police, but their reaction is lackadaisical, as if they have better things to do than chase vanished kids.

One problem the LAPD has is the weekly broadcasts of the Rev. Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), "the Lord's word on radio," a crusading Presbyterian minister who believes "our protectors have become our brutalizers" and lambastes the force under Chief James E. "Two Guns" Davis as "the most violent, corrupt, incompetent police department this side of the Rocky Mountains."

So, eager for good publicity, Capt. J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), the head of the LAPD's juvenile division, is more than happy to be able to call Collins five months later to report that Walter has been found alive and well in the Midwest. But when the excited mother shows up at Union Station for the reunion, she is in for a terrible shock. Presented with Walter, she takes one look and says, "That's not my son."

What happens next is increasingly the stuff of "The Return of Martin Guerre"-type nightmares. The more Collins insists, with increased proof as time goes on, that this boy is not her son, the more the LAPD tries to discredit her, paint her as a villainous unfit mother and apply even more coercive measures.

Yet as that police pressure increases, Collins refuses to buckle. Instead, she gets increasingly frantic, wild that time that could be spent finding her son is being squandered, and it is this edge of anxiety that is the heart of Jolie's deeply felt performance. Dealing with the recent death of her own mother and herself a mother with several children, Jolie brings emotional desperation to a role she quite possibly connected to in ways she wished she hadn't.

As this scenario unfolds, we are also made aware of developments in another case. LAPD Det. Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly) goes out to a lonely chicken ranch near Riverside and arrests a 15-year-old boy to be deported back to Canada, a boy with a strange story to tell.

As these cases develop, helped by strong performances by little-seen actors like Jason Butler Harner, they form a relentless pincers movement whose prongs move forward with an awful fatalism. In other hands, these clashes of good and evil might have seemed ordinary, but Eastwood makes "Changeling" a hard story to shake off. To see this film is to understand both how fragile and how essential our hopes for decency and truth are in a world that must be made to care about either one.

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kenneth.turan@latimes.com

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'Changeling'

MPAA rating: R for some violent and disturbing content and language

Runing time: 2 hours, 21 minutes

Playing: In general release