Strong call for change

For the second time in his career, Clint Eastwood settles on a heroine for the celebration of a loner who bucks the system.

A single mother, Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) fights with a corrupt police department, psychiatric ward and the court of justice, where she demands to know one thing: What happened to her son?

In this true story, Eastwood reveals a 1928 Los Angeles awash in corruption and steeped in a culture that treats women as hysterical and unreliable beings when they challenge male wisdom.

Jolie sheds her movie-star image and delivers a powerful performance as a tenacious woman who gathers strength from the forces that oppose her.

Establishing connect

Changeling is a period film that deals with a situation unimaginable in contemporary American society.

Universal's challenge is to make the film connect with an audience more interested in the kind of police corruption usually found in Scorsese films.

In March 1928, Christine Collins's 9-year-old son Walter vanishes.

Five months later, the LAPD, delivers to Christine a boy who claims to be her son but is not.

To avoid embarrassment, Captain Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) demands she take the boy home on a “trial basis''. When she continues to insist that the LAPD needs to find her real son, Jones does what the department always does with troublesome citizens: He locks her up in a psycho ward.

A radio minister, Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), takes up her cause and challenges the police version of events.

Meanwhile, another officer, Ybarra (Michael Kelly), launches an investigation into a potential serial killer (Jason Butler Harner).

Both prove Christine's contention and expose the force, its chief and the mayor to the wrath of a citizenry fed up with living in a police state.

Christine's intransigence in the face of corruption does what no newspaper in that city is willing to do: Challenge the official stories of City Hall. Sticking fairly closely to facts, the movie drags us through a couple of courtrooms that causes the drama to sag momentarily.

But screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski and Eastwood are good at cutting to the chase.

Seldom does a 141-minute movie feel this short.
Wake-up call for society

The movie draws strength from Eastwood's own melodic score, which evokes not only a period but also the mood of a city and even a country nervously undergoing galvanic changes.

The small-town feel to the street and sets, seeming oh-so-quaint to modern eyes, captures a society resistant to seeing what is really going on.

So in Changeling, Eastwood continues to probe uncomfortable subjects to depict the individual and even existential struggle to do what is right.