Eastwood’s ‘Changeling’ is missing the mystery

By JOHN ANDERSON

Before wading into the woeful matter that is “Changeling,” may this review acknowledge that Clint Eastwood has been on a roll? Since 1992’s “Unforgiven,” the movies he’s directed have received a total of 30 Oscar nominations, winning two for Best Picture, two for Best Director. He is esteemed. Revered. In France, he’s known by a single-syllable sobriquet: “Cleeent.”

Recently, however, he’s started hanging out with the wrong crowd. Eastwood has been renowned for his no-nonsense style of fiscally conservative, story-driven filmmaking, and as a man who sticks to the idea of narrative over star power.

However: Angelina Jolie’s star is apparently so incandescent that it blinded Eastwood to the story mechanics that have made his films so sound. Her outsized persona dwarfs whatever scant drama the movie has to offer. Which is weird, because the story of Jolie’s character, Christine Collins, ought to have us riveted.

It is 1928, and Collins is a Pacific Telephone & Telegraph employee, helping to remedy the telephonic ills of a fledgling Los Angeles. One day, upon returning home, she finds that her young son, Walter (Gattlin Griffith), is gone. Months of fruitless searches go by. Meanwhile, the corrupt Los Angeles Police Department is under attack by the Rev. Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), a reformist, radio-broadcasting minister.

One day, after the police get a report that a kid found in DeKalb, Ill., matches young Walter’s description, the kid is returned to Collins. Case closed. Public happy.

Except that Collins insists the boy isn’t her son. She is at first dismissed, then defamed, then committed to an insane asylum. Only the efforts of the cop-baiting Briegleb — and the fact that young Walter’s fate becomes entwined with that of a child serial-killing case east of Los Angeles — prevent the single mother from disappearing into the medieval labyrinth of LAPD injustice.

Injustice has always been meat to Eastwood, but the previous movies were fictions. “Changeling” bears the burden of “based on a true story” — words that can excuse implausibility in a script, but can also hamstring the filmmaker.

What’s MIA in “Changeling” is something to prevent it from becoming penal-system porn: Yes, Collins fits tongue-and-groove into Jolie’s public persona of feminism, activism and philanthropic motherhood; her suffering at the hands of LAPD Capt. J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), who is trying to stanch the damage to his department that Briegleb’s radio broadcasts have done, creates a great deal of righteous indignation. But far too little intrigue.

The situation involving Christine and the alleged Walter (Devon Conti) isn’t very interesting. At no time does the audience wonder if this might actually be Walter. The new Walter is shorter; the new Walter is circumcised, while his predecessor was not. No one, from Jones to Police Chief James Davis (Colm Feore) to an infamous police doctor (Peter Gerety), who claims that trauma has likely shrunk Walter’s spine, makes a plausible argument that Walter isn’t still out there, missing.

Christine is treated like dirt, her motherhood besmirched; she gets a naked power-hosing in the psychiatric prison, is cold, hungry, force-fed, force-drugged. The body-cavity search is excruciating and borders on the pornographic, sadistic and emotionally cheap.

“Changeling” is graced by some nice period detail, an ethereal diffusion of light bestowed by first-rate cinematographer Tom Stern and a portrait of Los Angeles that’s part Chaplin and part “Chinatown.” But “Changeling” is a totally star-driven vehicle in which you find yourself missing something very essential. Something very Cleeent.