Often, it’s a sign of a movie’s greatness when you are unable to move once credits roll. You sometimes need to sit and collect your emotions before you leave. I had to do that with Changeling, as the movie had a profound effect on me, but the anger I felt was not directed towards the films antagonists but towards the filmmaker. I was disgusted and offended.
I should point out, that of course, I am in the minority here. The movie came within three votes of being voted the Best Film of the Cannes Film Festival, and it has ended up on many critics Ten Best lists. With the exception of Unforgiven, I am not a fan of Clint Eastwood as a director, and I know that a whole lot of people are. So you should probably take what I am about say with a grain of salt, but feelings from deep within me told me that something about the film was deathly wrong.
The movie is based on a true, tragic story of a Los Angeles woman named Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a single mother whose son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) was kidnapped in 1928. The LAPD waited 24 hours before beginning an investigation and the story developed into a national story at a time when the police department was under fire from various sources, including Presbyterian minister Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovitch) for incompetence and corruption. After five months, they inform that they have located her son in Illinois, but the reunion is not heartfelt- the child (Devon Conti) is not her boy. Spoilers ahead. She tells this to the detective on her case, J.J. Jones (Jeffery Donovan) but he wants the case wrapped up, so he commits the totally sane woman to a mental institution where she tortured. This is not even the first of many unlikely but true things that occur in the movie.
Okay, I get that all of the terrible things portrayed here happened. But like another film about abuse and suffering in recent years, The Magdalene Sisters, I felt that the filmmakers lacked any kind of sensitivity about how to treat this material. On three separate occasions in my life, I have been emotionally scarred by inappropriate actions of police officers, two times severely. Watching this movie brought those memories back, but I felt like I was being manipulated by cheap dramatic ploys. Was the entire LAPD bad? If so, how did they get that way? The implicit argument that Eastwood is making in this movie is that pretty much everyone was guilty of horrid and callous insensitivity. Even the “sympathetic” cop, Detective Ybarra (Michael Kelly) at one point orders a child to do something so abusive that it was difficult to think about. I have no doubt that there are bad people on every police force, and that sometimes even good cops do bad things, but I knew that already. WHY, damnit?! The only reason they abuse Christine and the other characters in this film is to get a rise in us, the audience. It’s wrong for Eastwood and screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski (infamous for creating the worst TV show I have ever seen, Babylon 5) to bring up these serious issues and then treat them in such a cavalier, manipulative way.
The worst scene in the movie takes place shortly after Christine is involuntary committed to the mental institution. She is stripped naked, sprayed with a fire hose and then made to spread her legs, in full view of three people, while a nurse checks her for syphilis. What I saw on the screen was not a melodramatic moment. Jolie plays the scene so bravely and convincingly that I saw an actual person, suffering and being humiliated. I do not like to see people suffer, and I especially do not like to see women suffer. Sometimes, as in a movie like May, it is okay for a director to show pain on this level, to remind us that such things exist in the real world and it’s our call to do something about it. I saw no evidence of that goal in this film. Christine Collins was being humiliated on the screen, in 1928, and I could do nothing but sit in the audience, unable to help or comfort her. I was showed this and made to feel awful for no good reason, perhaps no reason at all, as there is no reason for this movie to exist. I hate this film.