Film Review: The Changeling
Jan. 24th, 2009 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakAka the one Clint Eastwood did with J. Michael Straczynski, or, as we Babylon 5 fans call him, JMS. Of JMS' post-B5 projects, I'd rank this one pretty high - not his best - that's would be Supreme Power (up to the point where spin-offs were written) - but better than much of his Spider-man run (and I liked much of his Spider-man run, I hasten to add; the first few collections, which dealt with Peter Parker as a teacher and Aunt May finding out about his double life, were fab; let us not speak about how it ended). In terms of a Clint Eastwood film, I'm going to be heretical and say I prefer it to Mystic River, and had some similar themes. Both Eastwood and JMS had a departure from previous projects in that this film as a female main character, and not a young girl but an adult woman, and there is no fatherly mentor figure in sight. (There is one of JMS' sympathetic priests - more G'Kar than Father Theo, though -, but he's only one of Christine's allies, not her mentor, and also Clint Eastwood cleverly cast against type when choosing John Malkovich for the role. Also, Christine has her moment of recognition what she must do with another female character.) The female character in question, Christine Collins, isn't invented but did exist, and is another case of cast-against-type, as she's played by Angelina Jolie who just got an Oscar nomination for it. The setting is Los Angeles in the 20s (with an epilogue in the 30s), with a story one is surprised James Ellroy didn't write about, as it makes the police corruption in novels like L.A. Confidential downright fluffy in comparison, and yet I'm glad he didn't, because I have the feeling the emphasis then would have been on the cops or on the serial killer involved, and not on Christine.
After watching the film, I did a cursory check on the net, and as JMS promised, the outrage he describes did indeed happen. On March 10, 1928, a boy named Walter Collins went missing. There was increasing public pressure on the LAPD to solve the case, and five months later they produced a boy claiming to be Walter Collins. Christine Collins denied this was her son, and when she kept insisting on this, the LAPD had her committed to the psychopathic ward at Los Angeles County Hospital. When she was released due to a combination of the discovery of a serial killer having killed as many as 20 boys in Wineville and the fake Walter admitting that he was indeed not Walter Collins but Arthur Hutchens, she sued the Los Angeles Police Department and won; the transcripts of that case were what initially alerted JMS' attention. (What JMS' script leaves out is the depressing fact that Police Captain J.J. Jones - who had Christine locked up - and Police Chief Davis, despite the city council welfare hearing recommending that they leave their posts, were eventually reinstated, but on the bright side, the California State Legislature passed a bill that made it illegal for the police to commit someone to a psychiatric facility without a warrant as a direct result of that case.)
As presented in the film, Christine initially is Everywoman, albeit one who is confident in herself (there is no husband around, and she does fine on her own as a working mother) and is good at her job at the telephone exchange. But she doesn't pay attention to things like the news, and at first doesn't think to question the good will of the authorities. She is soft spoken and unfailingly polite, apologizing for her tears. When she has to face the truth that the cops really don't care what actually happened to her son as long as the case can be closed, and that even such blatant evidence as the imposter child being of a different height (with Christine's dentist affirming the set of teeth is also different, and her son's teacher equally testifying this isn't the same boy) is ignored, she starts to fight back, but what really changes her is her time in the psychopathic ward, as she realises hers isn't an exceptional case; that there are many other women in similar situations. It's a very archetypical descent in the underworld/rebirth/emergence as heroine passage - Joseph Campbell would have been delighted - but it works. It also includes Clint Eastwood pulling off the feat of shooting a shower sequence featuring Angelina Jolie which isn't in the least voyeuristic or sexual. There is only one comparable scene I can think of, the shower scene in the season 4 Angel episode Salvage featuring Faith. Like most of Jolie's screen characters, Faith is a character who usually is presented as very sexual, but in that scene, she faces her own vulnerabiliity, recent defeat and rage, and we see how much damage she has endured. Similarly, the nudity early in the mental asylum sequence sums up the assault on Christine by the authorities, with the water hitting her like a leash. From this point onwards, she has nowhere to go but up.
The prostitute Christine befriends in the ward points out how easy it is for a woman to be locked up and remain locked up - if she behaves emotional, she's hysterical, if she behaves restrained, she's depressed and disconnected from reality -, and the film does present the Individual Against The Man concept as something of a gender issue. (Though the nurses at the hospital are female, too. But checking on the background, I saw that one person got left out - the serial killer, Northcott, didn't just abuse and force his nephew into helping him - which is presented in the film - but was helped by his mother, who initially confessed to this as well - which is not. By leaving out Northcott's mother as a collaborator in serial killing and abuse, there are no negative female characters in the film, nurses aside.) Which makes for some of the most effective scenes, as Jones when trying to intimidate Christine accuses her of being a bad mother who wants to shirk her responsibilities, or the first doctor the police sends to her condescendingly telling her that as a woman, of course she is not capable of thinking clearly. It also has led to accusations that the film presents things as too black and white, but I don't think so. Yes, it's clear who the heroes and the villains are in this story, but the range of villainhood goes from insane serial killer Northcott (and JMS is good with writing serial killers as creepy but unglamorous) to the banality of bureaucratic evil as embodied in Jones (who probably believes what he says when declaring Christine got locked away for her own good, and why won't the woman shut up already). And we get a decent cop, too, Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly), who while being a part of the police department draws the line at wilfully overlooking the possibility of a serial killer at large and investigates against Jones' orders.
Which leads me to my next observation: Eastwood is good at using his child characters. Walter in the opening sequence with his mother comes across as a likeable boy but no angel of sweetness, the changeling of the title, Arthur Hutchens, is every "who, me?" childlike lying you can remember (his motive for impersonating Walter was that he wanted to go to Hollywood and meet his favourite actor, Tom Mix), and we get two outstanding scenes from teenage characters, one from Sanford Clark, the nephew of the serial killer, when he tells Ybarra about the deaths of all the children, and one from a surviving victims who could escape and is found in 1935, David. There is a compassion and humanity in these scenes which embodies why I prefer this film to Mystic River.
I found the heavy period make-up for Christine sometimes distracting, but it does provide a contrast to the psychopathic ward sequence, and it also helps to make Angelina Jolie look, well, not like Angelina Jolie but a woman in the 20s. The ending, with Christine after having found hope again and being able to enjoy some aspects of life once more, getting lost in the crowd while the camera goes up echoes Chinatown, which is ironic considering that Chinatown has one of the most cynical endings ever, and this film, while not ignoring the darkness it has conjured up, is cautiously optimistic in humanity (i.e. Christine was able to help the other women locked up like she was, the paragraph allowing it was abolished, and while her hope that maybe Walter wasn't killed but could escape like David did and is still out there somewhere might be unrealistic, she has started to live again, has friends, and is once more looking forward to things in life). There are some meta aspects in this film - early on, when preparing the photo op of Christine's reunion with her "son", Jones declares that the people love a happy ending, for example - and the crowd Christine gets lost in passes in front of a cinema showing, empasizing Los Angeles as a filmic construct in so many ways. But as I said, this ending doesn't feel forced or trite, but fitting, in the best sence.
All in all: not my choice for film of the year, but a very good one worth watching.
After watching the film, I did a cursory check on the net, and as JMS promised, the outrage he describes did indeed happen. On March 10, 1928, a boy named Walter Collins went missing. There was increasing public pressure on the LAPD to solve the case, and five months later they produced a boy claiming to be Walter Collins. Christine Collins denied this was her son, and when she kept insisting on this, the LAPD had her committed to the psychopathic ward at Los Angeles County Hospital. When she was released due to a combination of the discovery of a serial killer having killed as many as 20 boys in Wineville and the fake Walter admitting that he was indeed not Walter Collins but Arthur Hutchens, she sued the Los Angeles Police Department and won; the transcripts of that case were what initially alerted JMS' attention. (What JMS' script leaves out is the depressing fact that Police Captain J.J. Jones - who had Christine locked up - and Police Chief Davis, despite the city council welfare hearing recommending that they leave their posts, were eventually reinstated, but on the bright side, the California State Legislature passed a bill that made it illegal for the police to commit someone to a psychiatric facility without a warrant as a direct result of that case.)
As presented in the film, Christine initially is Everywoman, albeit one who is confident in herself (there is no husband around, and she does fine on her own as a working mother) and is good at her job at the telephone exchange. But she doesn't pay attention to things like the news, and at first doesn't think to question the good will of the authorities. She is soft spoken and unfailingly polite, apologizing for her tears. When she has to face the truth that the cops really don't care what actually happened to her son as long as the case can be closed, and that even such blatant evidence as the imposter child being of a different height (with Christine's dentist affirming the set of teeth is also different, and her son's teacher equally testifying this isn't the same boy) is ignored, she starts to fight back, but what really changes her is her time in the psychopathic ward, as she realises hers isn't an exceptional case; that there are many other women in similar situations. It's a very archetypical descent in the underworld/rebirth/emergence as heroine passage - Joseph Campbell would have been delighted - but it works. It also includes Clint Eastwood pulling off the feat of shooting a shower sequence featuring Angelina Jolie which isn't in the least voyeuristic or sexual. There is only one comparable scene I can think of, the shower scene in the season 4 Angel episode Salvage featuring Faith. Like most of Jolie's screen characters, Faith is a character who usually is presented as very sexual, but in that scene, she faces her own vulnerabiliity, recent defeat and rage, and we see how much damage she has endured. Similarly, the nudity early in the mental asylum sequence sums up the assault on Christine by the authorities, with the water hitting her like a leash. From this point onwards, she has nowhere to go but up.
The prostitute Christine befriends in the ward points out how easy it is for a woman to be locked up and remain locked up - if she behaves emotional, she's hysterical, if she behaves restrained, she's depressed and disconnected from reality -, and the film does present the Individual Against The Man concept as something of a gender issue. (Though the nurses at the hospital are female, too. But checking on the background, I saw that one person got left out - the serial killer, Northcott, didn't just abuse and force his nephew into helping him - which is presented in the film - but was helped by his mother, who initially confessed to this as well - which is not. By leaving out Northcott's mother as a collaborator in serial killing and abuse, there are no negative female characters in the film, nurses aside.) Which makes for some of the most effective scenes, as Jones when trying to intimidate Christine accuses her of being a bad mother who wants to shirk her responsibilities, or the first doctor the police sends to her condescendingly telling her that as a woman, of course she is not capable of thinking clearly. It also has led to accusations that the film presents things as too black and white, but I don't think so. Yes, it's clear who the heroes and the villains are in this story, but the range of villainhood goes from insane serial killer Northcott (and JMS is good with writing serial killers as creepy but unglamorous) to the banality of bureaucratic evil as embodied in Jones (who probably believes what he says when declaring Christine got locked away for her own good, and why won't the woman shut up already). And we get a decent cop, too, Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly), who while being a part of the police department draws the line at wilfully overlooking the possibility of a serial killer at large and investigates against Jones' orders.
Which leads me to my next observation: Eastwood is good at using his child characters. Walter in the opening sequence with his mother comes across as a likeable boy but no angel of sweetness, the changeling of the title, Arthur Hutchens, is every "who, me?" childlike lying you can remember (his motive for impersonating Walter was that he wanted to go to Hollywood and meet his favourite actor, Tom Mix), and we get two outstanding scenes from teenage characters, one from Sanford Clark, the nephew of the serial killer, when he tells Ybarra about the deaths of all the children, and one from a surviving victims who could escape and is found in 1935, David. There is a compassion and humanity in these scenes which embodies why I prefer this film to Mystic River.
I found the heavy period make-up for Christine sometimes distracting, but it does provide a contrast to the psychopathic ward sequence, and it also helps to make Angelina Jolie look, well, not like Angelina Jolie but a woman in the 20s. The ending, with Christine after having found hope again and being able to enjoy some aspects of life once more, getting lost in the crowd while the camera goes up echoes Chinatown, which is ironic considering that Chinatown has one of the most cynical endings ever, and this film, while not ignoring the darkness it has conjured up, is cautiously optimistic in humanity (i.e. Christine was able to help the other women locked up like she was, the paragraph allowing it was abolished, and while her hope that maybe Walter wasn't killed but could escape like David did and is still out there somewhere might be unrealistic, she has started to live again, has friends, and is once more looking forward to things in life). There are some meta aspects in this film - early on, when preparing the photo op of Christine's reunion with her "son", Jones declares that the people love a happy ending, for example - and the crowd Christine gets lost in passes in front of a cinema showing, empasizing Los Angeles as a filmic construct in so many ways. But as I said, this ending doesn't feel forced or trite, but fitting, in the best sence.
All in all: not my choice for film of the year, but a very good one worth watching.
