#174: Changeling
Clint Eastwood’s film touches on adult fears: missing children and a corrupt, uncaring state
This review was originally posted to Twitter on August 28, 2019.
Initial release: October 24, 2008
Director: Clint Eastwood
What would you do if your child was replaced with a stranger? What would you do if everyone told you that you were delusional, an unfit mother for denying the child as your own? Well, the “changeling” of myth isn’t real, but the Walter Collins case sure is.
In early 1928, a young boy, Walter Collins, disappears from his quiet Los Angeles suburb. Five months later, the Los Angeles Police Department proudly presents his mother, Christine, with a young boy who claims to be Walter, but she insists that he isn’t — and the detective on the case tells her to her face she’s wrong.
She takes the boy in anyway, partly because he has nowhere else to go, but she continues to insist that the police, which spent five months twiddling their thumbs until they lucked out on finding some random kid, continue to do nothing to find her real son. Eventually she becomes such a nuisance (especially once she provides proof and sworn testimony that “Walter” isn’t really Walter) that the LAPD, seeking to avoid embarrassment, have her institutionalized under “Code 12” — code for “people the cops want to sweep under the rug.”
Meanwhile, a seemingly unconnected deportation case results in the discovery that someone has been kidnapping kids from all over the area and killing them, burying them on his chicken farm in Wineville, just outside of Los Angeles — and Walter was identified as a victim. When all this gets out — including the “Code 12” stuff — the resulting public relations shitshow ends up exposing the corruption that infects the LA city government at all levels. (As an aside, the fake “Walter” was a runaway who just saw an opportunity to meet his favorite actor, silent-era western hero Tom Mix.)
Say what you will about Clint Eastwood, but he brings a lot of different talents to film. Aside from a long career in acting he’s also directed his own films since the 1970s, some of which he even scores. He brings that and a surprisingly well-selected all-star cast to this film. Between his directing and J. Michael Straczynski’s extensively researched script, what we have here is a hard-hitting drama about a case that might not be as famous as, say, the Black Dahlia, but really speaks volumes about what it means when you can’t trust institutions.
Eastwood has long had a very low-key approach to directing, preferring to lean on simple camera work and mostly understated performances, and that remains true here, but he has an attention for just the right level of detail that draws the eye without being too confusing. Late 1920s LA is sketched out faithfully here, with just enough details without going too far into pastiche. A nice touch is the phone exchange where Christine works utilizing roller skates for its clerks to help them get around faster, which was a real practice in the 1920s.
While the casting screams Oscar bait with names like Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich, it doesn’t rely on the usual schmaltz you would expect — Eastwood is not Steven Spielberg, after all. Instead it blends crime drama and political intrigue with bits of film noir for a heavy film that’s as much about the LAPD as it is about a missing kid.
(To be fair to Jolie and Malkovich, both of them are top-shelf actors, and I think people tend to forget that as elitist as the film industry can be when handing out awards to itself, that doesn’t necessarily mean the actors it rewards aren’t good at what they do — and, editing this review now in 2023, it should be obvious that every actor, famous or not, should get paid for their work.)
And speaking of all-star casting, Geoff Pierson plays a firebrand of a lawyer who takes on Christine’s case against the city, and it was a treat to see him so far from Unhappily Ever After, which was basically a shameless Married With Children ripoff.
Perhaps because Eastwood is so talented at streamlining filmmaking is why there was room to make this movie run nearly two and a half hours long; yet it never feels like it slogs. There’s a lot to tell about the Walter Collins story, and Eastwood made sure most of it went in. The two threads — the LAPD’s handling of the Collins case, and the actual Wineville chicken coop murders — intertwine beautifully, and Eastwood deftly blends together the separate legal dramas in a way that feels natural, because they’re basically two sides of the same story.
(Wineville later changed its name to Mira Loma. Wonder why.)
This film might be Oscar bait, but it’s still a tough, unflinching critique of one of the most corrupt cities in America. It’s telling that this film not only was relevant in 2008 but remains relevant now, as police corruption and violence is the norm across America.
In short, all cops are bastards, Christine Collins deserved better, Angelina Jolie may have been hunting an Oscar but her performance is fantastic, and Clint Eastwood is a much better director than he is a person.
