Get ready to board the Oscar train folks, Changeling is in town, and the buzz is that it’s a contender for awards. Well, I’m not massively fussed about that side of things, but I am interested in seeing what Clint Eastwood has to offer, on the basis of films he’s directed from Bird to Million Dollar Baby.

This time round, Clint brings us a true tale, researched and written by J. Michael Straczynski, most known as the creator of tv sf series Babylon 5. Word has it that the film was shot from the first draft of the script, and if that’s the case then Eastwood bears at least some responsibility for its many weaknesses.

Bottom line is, this is a great story with a weak screenplay. The material is solid gold, with Angelina Jolie as a mother whose son goes missing, only to have the police announce that they’ve found him and return her an imposter. That leads to a whole bunch of unpleasantness as Jolie’s character is incarcerated in an asylum, a reflection of the corrupt power of the Los Angeles police and weird attitudes on the part of the medical establishment back in the twenties.

All of which sounds like the basis of a fascinating tale. Problem being, it’s written on the nose throughout. There’s no nuance in what’s going on: Jolie is a loving mother determined to get her son back at the start of the film, and that’s exactly what she is at the end. Along the way she rages against the machine, and wins, and it’s all written more like a tv movie of the week than a piece of quality cinema.

There’s no light and shade to suggest Jolie is deserving of anything other than canonisation for her devotion to her boy as she takes on the powers that be. Compare to Erin Brockovich, where Julia Roberts gets to portray a three dimensional character whose less polished traits only endear her to us all the more, and who plays a more active role in facing down the corrupt authorities. Maybe Jolie’s character, Christine Collins, really was saintly and focused the whole damn time, but the story would have been a bit sparkier if she’d at least threatened to fall off her perch at some point.

It all looks just dandy and convincingly of its era, but that’s not too difficult with a big budget and some digital shenanigans. There’s an old time sheen across the whole thing that threatens to anaesthetise the audience, but thankfully a couple of unusual performances kept me awake. John Malkovich provides one as a crusading priest, which he brings his usual intelligence and unusual choices to. The other is a murderer, Gordon Northcott, brought to something like life by actor Jason Butler Harner. I think his acting was good, but something about his portrayal of the killer brings to mind the cartoon character Snagglepuss. At any rate, it’s certainly distinctive.

Quite how such promising material ends up so vanilla I couldn’t tell you. But it’s a reminder that Clint’s tastes are sometimes unreliable, albeit tuned in to commercial success: witness his adaptation of the execrable Bridges of Madison County
and his choice to perform alongside an orangutan on a couple of occasions. If anything, that suggests my own aesthetic needs to be more akin to Clint’s if I’m after a lasting career. Hmm…anyone on for a tale about a woman who reconnects with her war-traumatised fiance by getting him a pet lemur? Queries to the usual email address.