Changeling

It was sometime after seeing Mystic River and Letters from Iwo Jima in the theater that I wrote off seeing any more Clint Eastwood films. Those cinematic exercises in relentless misery were well constructed and all, but watching them made me feel like drowning myself in the bathtub would be a whimsical endeavor in comparison. I don't know where it was exactly that Eastwood essentially became Gaspar Noe with a more melancholic bent, but a little of that goes an awful long way. In my estimation, Eastwood's finest moment will always be Unforgiven, that perfect marriage of gentle poetry and ass whupping that deservedly netted Clint best picture and Director. Other than sharing a comedy bit with my friends in which we imitated Clint's hilariously over exaggerated grimacing done in Absolute Power while watching Gene Hackman's POTUS murdering a woman, nothing the man has done in the last 2 decades has appealed to me much. Apparently my wife was unaware of this opinion and took Netflix's suggestion of Changeling to heart. So, it was chagrined and with a wary, distrustful attitude that I sat down last evening to begrudgingly give this Hollywood legends work a fresh appraisal.

I had no idea Eastwood had finally decided to make an out and out horror film, but that's exactly what Changeling is. Sure, it has sumptuous period detail, top notch acting and sturdy, patient direction, but at heart this is a skin crawling genre film. A deeply unsettling dissertation on death, evil and loss. The film is a dizzying descent into the depths of this woman's hell. One atrocity and indignity after another is uncovered and suffered as the layers of sadness threaten to suffocate both protagonist and viewer alike.

I've never been sold on the merits of Angelina Jolie, but she is quite good in this. Her hallowed, skeletal beauty suits her characters martyrdom nicely and her exasperated rage is impressive in certain scenes, if a tad overdone and one note in others. Jeffrey Donovan is a hoot playing the despicable cop railroading Jolie out of corrupted laziness and plain old misogynist spite. His Irish policeman trying to be smooth in L.A. schtick is pure gold and perhaps the only area in which the film allows itself to have any fun. He's a magnetic presence and I look forward to seeing more of him. Michael Kelly brings an assuring, welcome stoicism to his decent (but not that nice) cop role. Amy Adams character however seems an afterthought not entirely fleshed out and whose pragmatic narrative purpose is jarringly at odds with the rest of the films more lucid tone.

But she's just the beginning of the problems with this film. A harbinger of tonal recriminations that begin to pile up and threaten to torpedo the uneasy, unknowable queasiness the film impressively exudes for the first ninety minutes. It begins to degenerate into maudlin, predictable set pieces that ground the film back in a safe reality its previous invention had so deftly avoided. For the first hour and a half of this two hour and fifteen minute film, it felt like a waking, Lynchian nightmare. A bottomless emotional hole designed to collapse your soul and prolapse your sense of right and wrong. So you can imagine why shoehorning in trite, A Few Good Men courtroom histrionics and sub par R. P. McMurphy sticking it to the man moments would ruin the momentum. The tacked on and totally unnecessary message of hope at the very end is particularly out of place and nearly unforgivable in the way it seems to suggest all is well when it clearly is not.

Still, that first hour an a half admittedly shattered something within me and I have not been able to get the more murderous moments of the film out of my head. I've decided against detailing the unsavory elements of this film because I don't have much of an idea how many have seen it and would prefer not to be the one that spoils it if you choose to. Needless to say, I went into this film not knowing much about how the story would play out and frankly, it does so in an unexpected, devastating fashion. It's a damn shame that through loss of directorial nerve and structural compromises made in the script, what could have been something truly great became something only frustratingly good. You can't go as far as this movie does, then try to take it back.